All of us are familiar with mobile phone ringtones. These are features that most of us love to customize and update. But do you know the principle behind it? Why do the ringtones sound like a real audio recording? The answer is simple. It’s not about how the melodies are composed, but about the protocol behind playing the melody. Ring Tone Text Transfer Language (RTTTL) is behind those wonderful lullabies and songs you have on your mobile phone.
RTTTL is a common standard developed by Nokia to transfer ringing tones from a source to a destination. It can be from a computer to a mobile phone or from a mobile phone to another mobile phone through Short Messaging Systems (SMS). This is very popular with many Nokia phone models and is slowly being adopted by other mobile phone manufacturers.
From the web, there are thousands of websites that offer free downloadable ringtones. Some of these are already created for a user to download and other melodies are encoded in RTTTL so that a user can manually compose melodies without downloading the actual ringtone. The code can be confusing to a beginner, but it will surely be understandable once you get used to it. Mobile phone users can also create ringtones of their choice following the standard.
An RTTTL encoded ringtone can be downloaded to a computer and uploaded to a mobile phone. This may require special software and a cable designed for the task. To fully enhance the feature, a user can listen to the melody first before downloading it, and once downloaded, the user has the option to edit the codes following the RTTTL standard.
So what is an RTTTL made up of? Like many other standards, it is made up of a name, a default value, and data. There are also standards applied with RTTTL. The name section identifies the ringtone and can only handle names no longer than ten (10) characters and must not contain a colon (:). This can be a song title turned into a mobile phone ringtone.
The default value, on the other hand, contains the settings for how the melody will play. This can be represented by the letters d for duration, b for tempo, and or for octave; each representation is followed by an equal sign (=) and the value. The duration indicates the notation to use. It can be a whole note (1), a half note (2), a quarter note (4), an eighth note (8), a sixteenth note (16), and thirty-two (32).
The octave determines the interval of each tone encoded in RTTTL.
The data part of the RTTTL standard is the notes used by the pitch. It can contain a rest or pause, a standard key (a – g), a sharp key (#), and a minor key (b). The combination of all these elements will produce a standard RTTTL tune.
A part of the melody from Harry Potter, a movie created from a bestseller by Joanne Rowling, can be represented using a Nokia RTTTL format as: HarryPotter:d=4,o=5,b=125:2- , 8-, 8b, 8 .e6, 16g6, 8f#6, 4e6. This contains all the elements necessary to produce a quality audible melody. You can try to compose your own true RTTTL ringtone on your Nokia mobile phone.