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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In 1997, your cell phone could make two kinds of sounds. It could "ring"--our anachronistic word for the electronic trill that phones produce when you receive a call--or it could play a single-line melody, like "Fur Elise." If you've ever heard a cell phone bleep out Beethoven without the harmony, you'll understand that this wasn't much of a choice. At about this time, Nokia, the Finnish cell-phone company, introduced "smart messaging," a protocol that allowed people to send text messages to one another over their phones, and Vesa-Matti Paananen, a Finnish computer programmer, realized that it would work equally well for transmitting bits of songs. Paananen developed software called Harmonium that enabled people to program their cell phones to make musically complex sequences--melodies with rudimentary harmonic and rhythmic accompaniment--that they could forward to friends using smart messaging.
Those familiar with Linux, the freely available, open-source operating system developed by Linus Torvalds, another Finnish programmer, will not be shocked to learn that Paananen, in a nationally consistent fit of altruism, put Harmonium on the Internet for anyone to download, thus passing up a shot at becoming a billionaire. Companies called aggregators, which collect and distribute digital content, capitalized on Paananen's innovation, using his software to create what is today known as the polyphonic ringtone: a small packet of code that plays the phone as if it were a music box, producing a synthesized approximation of a song that often sounds...
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