How Nokia ringtones became the first viral earworms

How Nokia ringtones became the first viral earworms

One of the internet’s better-known ringtone archivists was barely alive to witness the golden age of his biggest hobby. 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. “I love the sound of old ringtones, partly due to nostalgia and partly because I think there’s genuine underlooked gems,” he says. Today, Fusoxide is behind the popular @ringtonebangers Twitter account. With others, like @OldPhonePreserv, he helps to maintain Andre Louis’ phonetones directory — a repository of phone software, sound banks, ringtones, and audio ephemera from a bygone era. 

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. 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. 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. And yet, my curiosity remains. With younger people interested in ringtones, how have perceptions changed about their origins, and how have ringtones lived on in modern soundscapes?

The groundbreaking ringtone work at Nokia is largely kept alive by hobbyists who extract ringtones from old firmware. “Sometimes the firmware is encrypted so it’s near impossible to get the files,” Fusoxide explains. “A lot of the time these packs are handled by more experienced people.” His love for the cultural aspects of the medium has made @ringtonebangers 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.

Ringtone culture arguably began in the mid-’90s with the Nokia Tune, which borrowed from the song “Gran Vals” by classical guitarist Francisco Tárrega. Wherever you went back then, it was impossible to escape the sound of Tárrega’s greatest legacy. Timo Anttila, one of Nokia’s early in-house composers, bought his first phone, a Nokia 2110, in 1996. “Suddenly everybody got their own phone and everyone wanted to have personal ringtones and background images,” he says. “First buzzer tunes were… really annoying, but those were iconic and changed the sonic environment quite dramatically.” When Nokia unveiled the world’s first polyphonic ringtone in 2002, piercing melodies became a ubiquitous part of daily life and took on new significance as a form of personal expression.

Besides Anttila, the Nokia sound team was made up of young composers like Hannu af Ursin and Henry Daw as well as Aleksi Eeben, Markus Castrén, and contractors like Ian Livingstone and Noa Nakai. Castrén and Eeben were involved in the demoscene where experimental coders and artists pushed the boundaries of computer-generated art and music. Af Ursin was an underground DJ who co-ran a club night called Miau! in Tampere, Finland. “We made quite a few tracks and some of them ended up in great places like Global Underground,” he says. 

In 2000, Livingstone placed a magazine ad looking for work under the company name “MTS Media Themes and Sound Design.” When Nokia’s then-head of audio Jarkko Ylikoski responded, he was forced to reveal that MTS was just himself working out of a bedroom. Livingstone, who’s since scored Forza Horizon 5 and multiple Total War games (among many other things), didn’t even have a mobile when he started contract work at Nokia. “I’d spent a few years programming karaoke backing tracks via MIDIfiles for Roland — basically transcribing famous pop songs and reproducing [them] via a tiny General MIDI soundset,” he says. “So I had quite a few tricks up my sleeve making the most out of limited sound resources.” A year later, he produced the first polyphonic version of the Nokia Tune, which was initially released as a South Korean Nokia exclusive before it launched worldwide.  

Nokia was poised to conquer the limitations of the phones’ small speakers and capture the sonic zeitgeist of the early 2000s — the heyday of club kids, trance, and house music. His first week on the job, Daw was shown to a room and asked to create ringtones with a small keyboard and a PC with Cubase audio software, which he didn’t know well. “It was a little daunting at first, but I soon got into and relished the challenge,” he says. The team occasionally examined competitor phones for research. According to af Ursin, their biggest fear was that customers would set up a new phone and find nothing that suited their tastes; the goal was for phones to come loaded with “something for everybody.” Eventually, Nokia worked with Beatnik, a pioneering audio tech company founded by 1980s MTV darling Thomas Dolby, which Livingstone remembers as a “huge step forward” for MIDI quality. 

Around 2005, Anttila realized that, wherever he went, he could hear a ringtone that he’d either composed or collaborated on. “By that time everyone had their phone sounds on in public. There were ringtones everywhere and most of the Finns had Nokias. That was really weird,” he says. “Nobody [knew] who did this and the amount of plays those tracks [had] globally every day… if you calculate the amount of phones that would make [the Nokia composers] one of the most recorded artists ever.” Not everyone appreciated the dulcet tones of Nokia’s pioneering ringtone work, though. While working on various versions of the Nokia Tune, Livingstone, who ended up installing a recording studio in his cellar, remembers a weak spot in the soundproofing that led to the kitchen. “It used to drive my wife mad having to listen to the Nokia ringtone over and over again for hours and days on end!” he says.