gramilano

The 1980s syn­thes­iser pion­eer Thomas Dolby is releas­ing his first album in two dec­ades, but you might know him bet­ter by his other achieve­ment — a revolu­tion in mobile phone ringtones.

It is pos­sibly the world’s best known mobile phone ring­tone and, depend­ing on your per­spect­ive, argu­ably its most annoy­ing. But there is little doubt­ing the suc­cess of Nokia’s fam­ous musical logo, which is said to be heard glob­ally nearly two bil­lion times per day, about 20,000 times per second.

One man who helped bring the world the sonic phrase known simply as “the Nokia tune” is the Brit­ish musi­cian Thomas Dolby, best known for his synthesiser-based hits of the 1980s.

At the begin­ning of the 90s I was get­ting pretty jaded with the music busi­ness, so I went to Sil­icon Val­ley, which was very excit­ing, and for the first time com­puter com­pan­ies were start­ing to take music seriously.”

Dolby set up a firm that cre­ated “poly­phonic” vir­tual syn­thes­isers — soft­ware that allowed com­puters to play musical notes and, import­antly, to play more than one sound at the same time.… [con­tinue reading]

Share