Mobile Phones Change Birds' Tune

Many wild birds are able to imitate the simple ringtones of mobile telephones, German ornithologists report, underscoring the influence of humans on the evolution of birds. InfosShop News reports.

"These birds can "sing up to 78 different phrases, and many of the simplest telephone ringtones coincide with them," ornithologist Matthias Werner, of the government's bird protection agency, told Tierramérica. The common titbird (Parus major) can sing 32 different songs," he said.

... "It's in the nature of these birds to imitate sounds in their environment that correspond to their own musical capabilities," said Richard Schneider, of the NABU Bird Protection Centre in the city of Mössingen (600 km south of Berlin).

"They can imitate those sounds so well that sometimes it is very difficult to hear the difference," he told Tierramérica.

"That's how evolution is: there is no predetermined scheme, and the influences of the environment, even if they are artificial, turn out to be considerable," he added."

Related: - Birds mimic ringtones

Ringtones that calm crying babies

GearFuse writes that The Japan Acoustic Laboratory have recently started selling ringtones online that calm crying babies.

Other therapeutic ringtones:

-- Mozart ringtones to relieve hayfever and stiff shoulders - muPass have teamed up with Dr Wago to launch a new range of therapeutic ringtones for their standard ringtone service.

-- Pherotones are ringtones with names like Testeroni or El Cuddlero that claim to make you irresistible to the opposite sex.

-- Samsung launched Phone which generated alpha waves that are supposed to enhances memory and concentration.

-- A member of the Aum Shinrikyo cult launched (very successfully) a ringtone which claimed to make a women's breasts grow larger - just by listening to it

Songs and Ringtones to overcome flood trauma

Can a song help overcome flood trauma? Yes, say psychiatrists here who have come up with innovative ways of helping people to recover from the trauma caused by weeks of flooding. The Times of India reports.

"A team of psychiatrists is urging people to get back to their daily routines and hum a motivational song when they can.

While the song is being repeatedly broadcast on FM radio stations, the psychiatrists have convinced mobile telephone companies to offer it and similar jingles as caller tunes and ring tones.

"Tata and Hutch have agreed to use the song as caller tune. They might introduce it soon," Surat psychiatrist Mukul Choksi said.

Birds mimic ring tones

Birds have learnt to imitate the ring tones of the omnipresent mobile phones, say German ornithologists, backing up a Danish gentleman's similar claim a few years ago (in 2001, the sparrows in his garden were chirping the Nokia classic tone).

"The birds have an uncanny ability to mimic these ring tones. This has picked up in tandem with the boom in mobile phone ownership," Richard Schneider of the NABU bird conservation centre near the university city of Tuebingen here said.

Jackdaws, starlings and jays were the best mimics, Schneider said adding that even practiced birdwatchers were being fooled by the birds.

One reason for the phenomenon was that these birds were increasingly common in the urban environment, even the relatively shy jay, he said. "There is food and an increasing amount of green space in modern cities."

The birds were simply adapting to their environment in imitating human sounds in what he termed an "evolutionary playground". [via Hindustan Times]

Related:

-- Mockingbird sings ringtones - Some breeds really know how to strut their stuff. Males dance, posture, bluff and sings note from ringtones or doorbells - all part of an elaborate routine to convince females of male prowess.

The Crazy Frog: History and Success Explained

Few people have heard of Wernquist, a 27-year-old Swede, but even those who haven't may still appreciate his gesture. He - perhaps more than anybody else - is responsible for the Crazy Frog, according to The Telegraph.

"The story of the frog starts in 1997 when Daniel Malmedahl, a Swedish 17-year-old, recorded his impersonation of the sound made by the two-stroke engines of his friends' scooters. His recording raised chuckles, and he put it on the internet, and was even asked to perform it on Swedish tele-vision.

For years, members of the online community who surf the web for fun, found it and laughed before telling their friends. The recording grew increasingly popular and, in 2001, was used in the Insanity Test, an online joke. If you could listen to the sound and stare at a picture of a red Formula One car for more than 60 seconds without laughing, you passed the test: you were clearly insane.

In 2002, Wernquist, a designer of 3D-graphics, took the test and chortled. He didn't know where the sound came from but, using his computer skills, he spawned the frog character, which he called The Annoying Thing, and created an animated cartoon which he posted on the website of his company, Turbo-Force 3D, where it is still available free of charge.

When he created the frog, he did not even know who had made the noise. His website included a request for the creator of the sound to contact him. A friend of Malmedahl's saw it and put the two in touch by phone. To this day, Wernquist and Malmedahl, who now sells computer components, haven't actually met.

It was only in 2004, that a worker at Jamba!, a German ringtone company, spotted its popularity on the internet and put it forward as an idea to his bosses. Markus Berger-de Leon, chief operating officer of Jamba!, says: "All of us saw it, the whole executive team, and we thought 'This is going to be big'." They approached Wernquist and Malmedahl and bought the rights.

Anyway, the frog teaches two business lessons.

-- Its success relied on the pairing of the internet and mobile phones. Without the web, the sound would probably be languishing on a tape somewhere.

-- And, while advertising played a role, the frog's success was built largely on the viral marketing of teenagers texting one another.

[...] What is more, no shops have been involved. The frog has been sold direct via SMS text messages and over the internet.

Indeed, the frog illustrates one of the most striking aspects of the mobile-phone-content business: the way it is evolving outside of traditional media companies rather than within them.

Pianist to play in Bismarck found fame in cell phones

If a cell phone starts ringing in South Korea, Brian Crain can guess whose tune it probably is.

His.

Crain, 34, an Idaho composer and pianist, reportedly has become quite the popular item in that country.

His "Butterfly Waltz" in particular is a hot cell phone ringer there, according to The Bismark Tribune (North Dakota).

Koreans turn into walking jukeboxes

This third chapter of an eight-part series on Internet culture in Korea featured in The Korea Herald, describes how as wireless handsets become every Korean's indispensable accessory, telecom companies are scrambling to tailor them to individual needs and tastes. The most common and audible way being through music.

"Users can access ring tones, color-rings, and other downloadable sound recordings through close to 100 Web sites on the Internet. Nate, an SK Telecom Web site, boasts a selection of over 500,000 songs, which grows daily.

Since the material now available accommodates a wide range of tastes and styles, many regard the ring tone or color-ring (ring back tone) as a telling marker of personality.

"It really shows what kind of person you are," said Kim So-young, a 24-year-old management consultant. "People use music on their handsets to express themselves. Even if you don't know the person at all, you can catch a glimpse of what they are like, their characteristics and their preferences."

Some said color-rings could play a role when arranging "sogae-ting," or blind dates. "They do not make or break first impressions, but they can certainly set the mood," said Kim.

Virtual Protest Ring Tone... and other suggestions

What a fabulous suggestion, on Don Park's Daily Habit's blog, to create a Virtual Protest Ring Tone in addition to a stop RFID Moblog , (cf Virtual Protest Moblog)

"If I was organizing it, I would create a Virtual Protest Ring Tone, something that say something about the protest, a jingle or a chant, whatever.  Let people show their support by downloading it and installing it on their cellphones so people around the supporters will notice and ask: Why does your phone say STOP RFID instead of ringing?

An obvious variation is "Howard Dean for President" ring tone."

This really opens up opportunities for ringtones and ringback tones such as TheFeature.com's suggestion for company jingles. Who said ringtones were just for kids?

Ringtones raise money for schools

Mobile technology developer iTouch has joined forces with MySchool, a South African loyalty program developed for schools, to offer ringtones, picture messages, logos and screensavers to their learners, while earning them cash at the same time.

For each download requested by a student, a portion of the fee is paid over to the learning organisation. Each school has its own ID code to make sure the money goes where it should.

Within minutes of launching the programme at the University of the Western Cape, over 1 000 minutes of calls to download ringtones had been clocked, according to ITWeb .

This is the second time I've heard of fund raising through ringtone revenues, the first being a campaign in the Philippines, to benefit a half-way house and counseling center for female victims and survivors of violence. cf Downloading ringtones to raise money .

And in in June 2001, for nationwide "Red Nose Day" in Australia, to help raise money for research into Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Australian telecommunications giant Telstra offered its clients -- not a ringtone -- but a Red Nose logo and donated US$0.95 to SIDS Australia for each logo that was downloaded.

For more on fund raising with cell phones, check out textually.org's SMS and Charities category.

Ringtone musicians - a success story

New technology allows for creative job opportunities and striving/starving musicians should consider this success story written up in The Express and Star. It sure beats waiting on tables until you get your lucky break.

Two partners, Iain Kerr and Jason Shaw founded a home-based venture whcih they called Melodi Ltd, creating ringtones for the UK and Australian market and since their launch in April 2002, their company has gone from strength to strength.

Both men are musicians and trained in London with mobile phone providers. As the demand grew, the company moved into offices in Lichfield, and Iain Kerr left his full-time job in local radio. Now the company has four full-time musicians.

Related stories posted previously in Ringtonia.com:

Soundonweb is another successful company, providing ringtones to the SonyEricsson assembly line. Twenty five professional musicians work on this alone. cf Behind the ringtone scene.

And Martin Plante who is Canadian, is the most famous ringtone composer, writing original ringtones for Cell Phones about.com and is touted as "the world's first ringtone artist to compose music exclusively for cell phones". cf Original Ringtones By Martin Plante.

Ringtones can lengthen the shelf-life of a song

Another good thing about ringtones and a tidbit that should make record labels snap to attention, picked up from The Mirror:

"Ringtones can lengthen the shelf-life of a song. The Sugababes' Round Round, for instance, hasn't featured in the Top 10 since last September but is at No.4 in the ringtone chart. This week's No.1 tone - the theme from TV comedy Phoenix Nights - has never been a single".

Playing classical ringtones are music to his ears.

There is someone out there who is not critical of ringtones, and he is a music professor besides! His name is Neil Cockburn and he is head of organ studies at Mount Royal's Conservatory of Music in Canada. He is quoted in CBC for saying: "A cell phone playing the classics is music to my ears". Cockburn believes that classical music as ringtones may lead to a greater appreciation of the classics and even expose people to such music for the first time, even if the quality of sound is not the greatest.

He even allows his students to bring their cell phones to class, if they set their ringtones to Bach, Beethoven or Brahms.

Ringing once: squillo or pranking

This is a favorite story, posted by Howard Rheingold in Smart Mobs last year, reporting on an article published in The Age, about Italian students who have developed an entire communications system based on not answering their cell phone when it rings. "They have called their development "the squillo". A squillo is a one-ring mobile phone call - squillare means "to ring" in Italian. The receiving phone buzzes for one to two seconds and then stops. It notes who the call is from, that is all. A squillo is not meant to be answered; it is meant to be noticed".

In the ON/OFF documentary on the social aspects of the use of communication technologies in a variety of cultural settings, the single ring practice came up in one of the English families filmed by the crew in London, but with a very different meaning. Unlike the Italians who ring once to flirt or convey the message "I'm thinking about you." UK Teenagers ring once to save money. In what they call "pranking", they dial a number and hang up after the first ring, so their number appears on the cell screen of the recipient, who then calls them back at his expense.

What Your Ringtone Says About You

No earth shaking news around the web on ringtones today (well, so far) so here is one of my favorite stories/studies from last year.

"Psychologist Graham Wilson believes that your choice of ringtones can reveal more about yourself that you might think. For example, young people choose popular music to show they fit in. An aggresive young professional may choose an action movie or tv show theme because they have no real action or drama in their lives. And people who don't choose ringtones at all view their phones a purely functional items and are too busy to download or choose a custom ringtones. This very scientific research is just another reason should set their phone to vibrate most of the time". The Herald via Techdirt Wireless.

Social Mobile Phones

In a fascinating article in TheFeature.com by Marc Frauenfelder -- February 24, titled «Beyond the Politeness-Button», Marc describes «The Social Mobile phones», a project developped by industrial design firm, Ideo.

The 5 SoMo handsets were designed to encourage conversation about the role of mobiles in public spaces and to curb abusive mobile behaviour, such as designing phones able to deliver an electric shock to your hand when the person you're talking to is too loud, or activating a little slingshot mechanism on a catapult phone -- which transmits a loud burst of incomprehensible babble to the offending person's handset, or having to play the phone like a flute in order to make a call.

Social Mobile Phones

In a fascinating article in TheFeature.com by Marc Frauenfelder -- February 24, titled «Beyond the Politeness-Button», Marc describes «The Social Mobile phones», a project developped by industrial design firm, Ideo.

The 5 SoMo handsets were designed to encourage conversation about the role of mobiles in public spaces and to curb abusive mobile behaviour, such as designing phones able to deliver an electric shock to your hand when the person you're talking to is too loud, or activating a little slingshot mechanism on a catapult phone -- which transmits a loud burst of incomprehensible babble to the offending person's handset, or having to play the phone like a flute in order to make a call.

Here Comes the Bride ringtone

This story spread around the world last october.

A bride walked down the aisle to the tinny strains of «Here Comes the Bride» played on a guest's mobile phone, after the organ player failed to make it to the church on time. cf Ananova