alt.cellular.nokia.ringtones

The group and its era

A monophonic ringtone was not a recording. It was a sequence of single notes, one at a time, with no chords and no timbre to speak of — and a sequence of notes is a thing that can be written down. That is the whole reason a plain-text newsgroup became the natural home of a music hobby.

Nokia supplied both halves of the mechanism. The Nokia 3210, released in 1999 and eventually sold in the region of 160 million units, was the first handset to come preloaded with Nokia’s Composer software, which let an owner enter a tune on the keypad: the number keys carried the scale, with further keys for note length, for the octave and for a sharp. The notation behind it was RTTTL — Ring Tone Text Transfer Language, the format Nokia used — which encoded a whole tune as one short line of ASCII: a name, a set of defaults for duration, octave and tempo, then the notes separated by commas. The notation allowed four octaves and a single voice, and nothing else.

A ringtone in that form was ordinary text. It could be posted, quoted in a follow-up, corrected a note at a time and reposted — exactly the operations Usenet was built for. The window was narrow, roughly 1999 to 2003: the handset generation in which a phone stopped being an appliance and became a personal object that people expected to sound like themselves.

What was discussed

The core of the traffic was transcription. A tune worked out by ear went up as a line of text; a reply said the bridge sat a tone high or the tempo was too slow; a corrected line went back. Reducing a piece of music to one voice with no sustain and no dynamics is a real editorial problem, and a good deal of the discussion is about what an arrangement should throw away.

Around that sat the ordinary genres of a hobby group: requests, filled and unfilled; questions about which models held how many user tones; advice on the octave and tempo limits. Because most owners had no data cable, keypad-entry notations mattered as much as the RTTTL line itself — the same tune written out as the sequence of key presses a person could thumb in standing at a bus stop. Nokia’s Smart Messaging, a proprietary extension that carried ringtones, operator logos and small monochrome picture messages inside ordinary SMS, offered the other route: a tone could simply arrive over the air, sent by a service or by another handset.

The group also sat in the shadow of an industry. Selling ringtones over the network began early — the first downloadable service, Harmonium, ran in Finland in 1998 — and worldwide ringtone sales peaked around 2004 at something near four billion dollars a year, much of it billed through premium SMS. A group of this kind was an obvious target for that trade, and alt.* offered no moderation, no admission control and no reliable way to keep a posting out or take it down once made. Much of what survives from the group’s later years is advertising rather than discussion.

Context

What ended the craft was better hardware. The Nokia 3510 of 2002 was the first Nokia handset to ship with a software sound engine for polyphonic playback, and the first commercial truetone service — real recorded audio rather than synthesis — launched in Japan in December 2002. A ringtone stopped being a line of text and became a file, and a file was not something one posted to a text newsgroup. The hobby moved to the websites and the shops selling the files, and the group went quiet.

The address is also a small lesson in how alt.* worked. Because anyone able to send a control message could create a group there — the founding arrangement described on the alt.* hub page — the hierarchy acquired groups for handset brands and for network operators without anyone deciding that it should, and then a sub-branch for a single feature of a single brand. That is why an address exists for Nokia ringtones specifically rather than for ringtones in general.

The Google Groups archive holds something over thirty thousand messages under this name, with the usual caveats about coverage and with a very heavy admixture of later spam. Read with that in mind, it records a brief period in which owning a mobile telephone involved composing music on it — and in which the ordinary way to share a tune was to type it out and let somebody else correct it.