“Suddenly everybody got their own phone and everyone wanted to have personal ringtones and background images,” he says. Timo Anttila, one of Nokia’s early in-house composers, bought his first phone, a Nokia 2110, in 1996. Wherever you went back then, it was impossible to escape the sound of Tárrega’s greatest legacy. Ringtone culture arguably began in the mid-’90s with the Nokia Tune, which borrowed from the song “Gran Vals” by classical guitarist Francisco Tárrega. “A lot of the time these packs are handled by more experienced people.” His love for the cultural aspects of the medium has made into more than just a casual archive thanks to his ongoing efforts to ask composers for files and interviews some of his famous followers include music critic Anthony Fantano and Rebecca Black, whose new music proves that ringtones still have a palpable echo in pop production, decades after their peak. “Sometimes the firmware is encrypted so it’s near impossible to get the files,” Fusoxide explains. The groundbreaking ringtone work at Nokia is largely kept alive by hobbyists who extract ringtones from old firmware. With younger people interested in ringtones, how have perceptions changed about their origins, and how have ringtones lived on in modern soundscapes? As he howls in confusion at the shrill bleeps, I realize that if you yanked me back to 2002 after years of quiet, discreet phone etiquette, I would probably feel the same. It sends me down a YouTube rabbit hole of old Nokia ringtones until I realize that my cat hates them and isn’t afraid to tell me. Reaching out to Fusoxide about a defining part of my lived childhood - the ’90s were a very special but awkward teething period for mobile phones - feels like a weird dream where time makes no sense. With others, like he helps to maintain Andre Louis’ phonetones directory - a repository of phone software, sound banks, ringtones, and audio ephemera from a bygone era. Today, Fusoxide is behind the popular Twitter account. “I love the sound of old ringtones, partly due to nostalgia and partly because I think there’s genuine underlooked gems,” he says. The 20-year-old Scottish musician, who prefers to be known by his online handle Fusoxide, got hooked through an Alcatel flip phone he had as a kid. One of the internet’s better-known ringtone archivists was barely alive to witness the golden age of his biggest hobby.
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