There was a period – a very brief, but intense, period – in the early 2000s when ringtones were The Future Of The Music Industry. Akin to the HD audio wars of today, there were monophonics, polyphonics and realtones to choose from that would sort out the committed audiophiles from the sonic daytrippers. There were even ringtone charts. Ringtone. Charts. Imagine! 

In Japan, master ringtones and ringback tones are still doing brisk business and this has a lot to do with the cultural role that mobile personalisation still plays there. But elsewhere ringtones are now filed away with cargo pants and Bebo as relics of the near past. 

But leave something long enough and a revival is sure to roll around.

Rather than recreate the spirit of Crazy Frog (goodness, they really were different times…), composer Hans Zimmer has partnered with Chinese smartphone manufacturer Oppo for its Find X3 Pro smartphone to offer two bespoke ringtones and what they are terming “an orchestra of system sounds”.

Alongside the two ringtones are a gentle alarm and a phone activation sound, as well as “a range of energising text and notifications alerts”. 

“I want the ringtone to open a door that says there’s the possibility to feel something,” says Zimmer in a video outlining the project and how conceptually it was designed as a reaction to the isolation caused by the pandemic. “I felt somehow it was my duty as a musician to figure out how to replace a little bit of that spirit that comes from one heart over to the other heart. The only way you can do music is by connecting notes, and those notes connect to musicians, and musicians connect to an audience, and suddenly you have a form of communication that you’ve never had before. That’s exactly what these phones are doing these days. They connect us.”

The whole thing – quaintly retro as it might be – is there to push the audio capabilities of Oppo’s hardware, a huge selling point for the company as it recently overtook rival Huawei as the leading smartphone manufacturer in China.