According to recent research, phone ringtones can become an identity. Rotimi Ige, writes about how this is possible and how certain deductions can be made about a person's personality from his/her ringtone.EVER wondered how funny the situation in a public bus would be if all the phones owned by the passengers ring at the same time' If the scenario was situated in Nigeria, the South to be specific, it would be almost certain that all genres of music would be adequately represented. From Apala music to jazz to monotones, every cell phone owner would patronise one. Music is one passion of most Nigerians and they welcome it at every opportunity.With the advent of mobile telephony, more Nigerians found a way to express themselves better, especially through music. Back in the day in 2001, when mobile telephony was first introduced to Nigeria, most of the phones sold were monotonic phones and so Nigerians were forced to compose their preferred tones, mostly tones of few popular songs, church choruses and islamic recitations.Then, a year later, polyphonic phones (many tones) were introduced and Nigerians could purchase set ringtones from certain providers. Tones like Mo wa dupe by Paul Play Dairo, African Queen by Tuface Idibia etc held sway and were the most popular ringtones. Before, most people picked one of the default ringers that came with their phone or just left it to vibrate. But increasingly, users started paying a premium, usually a token to purchase custom songs, jingles and sound effects, thus turning their mobile phones into a pocket jukebox.But with the advent of phones with infrared and later, bluetooth, with a high memory space through which actual live music, just like the ones played from cds and tapes, could be transferred and stored, the world has not remained the same. People, mostly youths, used the bluetooth devices on their phones to exchange music, movies, files and other things, thus fufilling the prophecy of making the world a global village. Now, with the introduction of mp3, mp4, android and endless memory phones, which can record and play almost any format, almost everyone, even pastors and imams, have their own favourite music on their phones."Ringtones are an opportunity to express yourself," says Efe Ejorkulem, a customer relations officer with a telecoms provider. "People want to stand out from the crowd."And Dr Wale Adebisi, a psychologist corroborates the claim saying, 'nearly everybody wants some form of identity and it can be expressed through fashion and now, music'.Research indicates that people do judge mobile users based on their ringtones. Earlier this year, a research by Isiaka Egbunu, a teacher, surveyed over 500 students and discovered that over 30 per cent of them thought having a standard ringtone was "not cool". Dr Adebisi, in his analysis of the survey, deduced that people who use their own recorded voice as a ringtone were self-obsessed, and that users who constantly change their rings might be flighty and unreliable, adding that people who retain one particular tone for a long period of time were viewed as more reliable, but sometime misjudged as 'old school'. So, what does your ringtone say about you' Below is an analysis that might interest you...If your phone plays a classic Sunny Ade, Haruna Ishola, Oliver de Coque or Ebenezer Obey, you're showing your age, but you get points for figuring out how to change the ringer, Granpa. If your phone is still playing "Jingle Bell Rock" in July, you're not going to impress people with your productivity. If your ringtone is a current hip-hop or R&B hit, you're young at heart, but you're not particularly original. Hip-hop ringtones accounted for more than half of the $300 million U.S. market in 2004.If your phone plays the sound of an old mechanical phone bell or the tone of the nine' o clock network news, you're not as funny as you think you are. If your phone plays the theme song to a television show, you're not going to impress anyone with your intellectual acumen. Perhaps a Mozart or Beethoven ringer would do some damage control. If your phone never leaves vibrate or silent mode, you may be the kind of important person who can't afford to waste time answering a phone call right now. Or maybe you just think you're that important. However, you may also be considerate and respectful, the kind of person we'd like sitting behind us in a movie theater. Unfortunately, we tend to get saddled with seatmates whose phones play the popular "Crazy Frog", "the clucking chicken", or any number of other annoying animal noises. If you're one of these folks, you may be a sociopath.Hip-hop artistes dominate ringtone downloads. Only two artistes have ever gone "platinum" by selling more than a million ringtones off of a single album: Beyonc Knowles sold more than a million ringtones from 'Dangerously in Love', as did Usher from 'Confessions'. But it's not just kids downloading these hits, because as Tayo Olayinka, a make-up artist said, your ringtone doesn't necessarily reflect your larger musical tastes. The effects of annoying ring tones are no joke. Some people fail to set their phones on vibrate at lectures, important meetings, church services etc, thus causing distractions during such activities and sparking off various perceptions about the culprit.Mrs Yinka Adedeji narrates an experience. "We were attending the birthday ceremony of a colleague and the chairman of the occasion was called up to give his keynote address. Along the line during his speech, his phone began to ring. Firstly, his ringtone was an explicit song, perhaps set by his granchildren, so people decided not to take note. And then calls began to come in one after the other as if they had been detailed to ring after each other and so he kept interuppting his speech to cut the line and the annoying ringtone. After a few annoying rings, he finally switched it off, but the deed had been done because most of the guests had formed certain perceptions about the otherwise gentle chairman", she informed.More so than one's CD or movie collection or mp3 playlist, a custom ringtone screams out something personal to the world because it's so public. Anyone within earshot can make an assumption about you, for better or worse. Now that it is understood that your ringtone goes a long way to forming a perception about who one might really be, the question then is, " what does your ringtone say about you
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