Ringtone ruminations

The fascinating thing about progress is that it's so uneven. Get a better engine and the electrics lag behind. Get a better processor and the memory is still clunky. And then there's the cases where one step forward is six billion steps back.

Take telephones. The development of the cell phone has revolutionised communications. Not only has it allowed people to remain in touch pretty much anywhere that's in sight of a cell tower, but it's allowed parts of the world that would have taken decades to wire together to be hooked into the global network in a matter of days, if not quicker. Whole stretches of Africa and Asia can leap from the 19th to the 21st century with the erection of a few towers or even just having a blimp show up. Furthermore, the handsets have in less than a decade become so sophisticated and complex that "phone" has become an historical anachronism that hardly describes what is essentially a handheld computer that lets you place a call almost as an afterthought.

You'd think that with all that capability the cell phone would have the field all to itself. Then a call comes in and the old GPO models just walk away with the prize.

When I was a lad, the standard issue phones where rubbish. They were either hard, black Bakelite blocks or over-engineered plastic with heavy flexes, often wired straight into the wall, and had all the audio quality of a porridge container and a bit of string. They did, however, have one redeeming quality: When a call came in the bells were so loud that you jumped screaming out of the chair. It was crude, but it did the job. Then for forty or so years, the boffins studied the characteristics of the human ear, how people determine the direction of sound, how they react to this or that tone, and how to create the perfect alert signal so that a precise message could be communicated with the minimum of effort.

Then they came up with the Select Your Own Ringtone for the cell phone and a half century of progress went right out the window. At first, it seems like a brilliant idea. Why put up with the tyranny of bells and beeps when you can have your favourite tunes to alert you to calls? That's what I thought when I had the clever idea of programming my phone with custom ringtones so that I knew who was calling before I picked up. So, I downloaded a couple of tunes to do the job. Since I'm fond of James Bond films, I used the Bond theme for general calls and the Mars movement from Holst's Planets suite for family calls. Then I relearned something that was already known for half a century: Low notes are harder to hear than high notes and both my selections were full of bass and minor keys.

By "relearn" I mean that I found out after I missed half a dozen calls and cheesed off the wife to no end. So I started looking for what tones were on offer for my phone and among all the hideous pop tunes and lame jokes I found (hurrah) some 1960s British telephone tones. Unfortunately, it wasn't the bells, but the little Brrp Brrp that you hear on the handset that, for obvious reasons, were designed not to blast your eardrums out. You'd have thought they'd have realised that it's a bit self defeating.

This raises an interesting point. On the one hand, you've got a device carried around in everyone's pocket that is the greatest boom to communication and the greatest invasion of privacy in human history. True, you can stay in touch with the entire world, but you also can't get away from the world. There's no point leaving the office or popping down to the pub for a quiet pint because you little electronic tattletale will be right with you. On the other hand, thanks to a pointless choice, at least you have an excuse when you say "Sorry, I didn't get your call."

Even aggravation has a silver lining.