History of Nokia Tune

The ringtone "Nokia tune" is actually based on a 19th century guitar work named "Gran Vals" by Spanish musician Francisco Tárrega. The Nokia

Tune was originally named "Grande Valse" on Nokia phones but was changed to "Nokia Tune" around 1998 when it became so well known that people

referred to it as the "Nokia Tune."

Do you want the full story - here it comes...

The year 1993 marked the beginning of the Nokia tune, starting with the launch of Nokia's 2100 series. The new phone was more advanced than

previous ones with 27 pre installed ringtones. Anssi Vanjoki (today Nokia's Executive Vice President and General Manager of Multimedia) suggested

that one of the pre installed tones could be Nokia's own ringtone. His proposal for the "Nokia tune" was Francisco Tárrega's (1852-1909) "Gran Vals"

that was currently used on Nokia TV-commercials.

Anssi Vanjoki gave the notes of the Gran Vals to Lauri Kivinen (Corporate Communications) , also a choir mwmber with the ability to read notes. At

first Kivinen thought it quite unnessecary for a phone to have several ringtones. People had been doing just fine with one ringtone.

However he developed the idea further and suggested a "piece" at the beginning of the Gran Vals. He thought that piece had the same spirit as

Nokia's slogan: Technology with a human touch.

The Nokia tune was first time played on a Compaq LTE computer in a finnish congress hotell. The ringtone was so good that the notes were faxed

directly to Oulu, Finland, where Nokia ringtones were developed.

In 1994, the Nokia 2100 series were launched and soon the Gran Vals or Nokia tune was playing all over the world. The Nokia 2100 series was a

success story, planning to sell 400 000, but sold 20 million!

In 1994 all ringtone sounds, including the Nokia tune were monophonic. Monophonic means that only one note is played at a time. The first step

towards a better ringtone was propably the fact that the phone loudspeakers were improved. And in the beginning only Nokia and Ericsson had

phones with changeable ringtones. Phone companies and operators had not yet realized the potential of the cell phone content business. One of the

first commercial ringtone services available was propably the finnish operator, Radiolinjas jukebox service in 1999.

The next milestone in the ringtone history was when Nokia and other phone companies adopted the MIDI standard that enabled richer and more

realistic polyphonic sounds. Nokia 3510 was propably the first phone optimized for playing polyphonic ringtones. This model can play MIDI level 4

content (playback of 4 simultaneous notes). Today we have phones with support for 42-polyphonic levels, real sounds and mp3 music