I feel strongly that bad ring­tones make our lives worse. And that fun, well-suited ring­tones can at least be charm­ing in inap­pro­pri­ate sit­u­a­tions. That should be the min­i­mum goal.

Mobile providers haven’t thought this through. Ver­i­zon, AT&T and (God for­bid) Apple have setup ring­tone cre­ation ser­vices by which one can excerpt part of a Glee cast record­ing track for a ring­tone. This is a bad idea sim­ply because phones have tiny lit­tle speak­ers that pro­duce a lim­ited range of fre­quen­cies; these songs sound hor­ri­ble on them! It’s like Tay­lor Swift turned into a Brook­lyn noise producer.

So what are the require­ments of a good ring­tone? The length’s got to be right: let’s say 7–15 sec­onds long. And the sounds have to be suited to the speak­ers of a phone—this is actu­ally a basic orches­tra­tion con­cept. Cell­phones pro­duce only a nar­row band of fre­quen­cies well. Think back to radio orches­tras, or Max Steiner scores. Film and radio com­posers of the 30s adapted their writ­ing for the record­ing tech­nolo­gies of the time: the strings would be writ­ten in four octaves much of the time since the mics would dull the strings. Sub­tlety in orches­tra­tion was pretty much out, in favor of mak­ing the orches­tra sound as full and crisp as record­ing tech­nol­ogy allowed.

We’ve got to make the same con­sid­er­a­tions for phones. Here’s one I wrote called Bounce which uses pri­mar­ily a sin­gle octave (plus piano dou­bling, and a cou­ple chords at the end):

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Bal­ance is impor­tant, too. When somebody’s hear­ing this thing in tran­sit, you’ve got tele­graph the mate­r­ial. Here’s one where the fore­ground ele­ment is a gui­tar, mixed way above the other instru­ments. This was the first one I made for my friend Ike (He didn’t like it because I dropped a beat in the middle).

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Some­times the best ring­tone mate­r­ial is very high reg­is­ter. Xylo­phone attacks, high piano, high syn­the­sizer, etc. hav­ing a way of cut­ting through a lot of noise, or purses, or hip­ster pants. Here’s the sec­ond one I made for Ike, fea­tur­ing mal­let per­cus­sion and piano (He liked this one).

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You don’t have to sac­ri­fice com­plex­ity either. I use this ring­tone often because there’s more to hear than just the fore­ground melody. The mid– and back­ground mate­r­ial con­sists of revolv­ing, syn­co­pated chords, which con­tin­u­ally change posi­tion in rela­tion to the melody. It’s simple—only two ele­ments (plus some back­ground percussion)—but it’s enough to keep me from want­ing to destroy my phone after hear­ing it 1,000 times.

After all, mate­r­ial is the pri­mal con­sid­er­a­tion. It’s got to stand up imme­di­ately and be attrac­tive enough to with­stand thou­sands of hear­ings. A good ring­tone theme should be like a shoe that fits the first time you wear it and doesn’t fall apart after a month. Rain­bow san­dals aren’t good enough; they take too long to break in. This ring­tone, MJ, also com­prises two main ele­ments, though it’s com­pletely dif­fer­ent in tone from Ike No. 2. It’s for Michael and apes sev­eral ten­den­cies of his recent style. It’s a lit­tle long for a ring­tone (0:24) but it’s chill, spa­cious, and the mate­r­ial deserves the time.

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You can also be a masochist and write a ring­tone that stabs your ears with fork prongs. Per­haps your com­po­si­tion teacher asked you to do this, for instance, and then attempted to sell it through Schirmer.

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