The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form

by Sumanth Gopinath

Overview

The rise and fall of the ringtone industry and its effect on mobile entertainment, music, television, film, and politics.

A decade ago, the customizable ringtone was ubiquitous. Almost any crowd of cell phone owners could produce a carillon of tinkly, beeping, synthy, musicalized ringer signals. Ringtones quickly became a multi-billion-dollar global industry and almost as quickly faded away. In The Ringtone Dialectic, Sumanth Gopinath charts the rise and fall of the ringtone economy and assesses its effect on cultural production.

Gopinath describes the technical and economic structure of the ringtone industry, considering the transformation of ringtones from monophonic, single-line synthesizer files to polyphonic MIDI files to digital sound files and the concomitant change in the nature of capital and rent accumulation within the industry. He discusses sociocultural practices that seemed to wane as a result of these shifts, including ringtone labor, certain forms of musical notation and representation, and the creation of musical and artistic works quoting ringtones. Gopinath examines “declines,” “reversals,” and “revivals” of cultural forms associated with the ringtone and its changes, including the Crazy Frog fad, the use of ringtones in political movements (as in the Philippine “Gloriagate” scandal), the ringtone's narrative function in film and television (including its striking use in the films of the Chinese director Jia Zhangke), and the ringtone's relation to pop music (including possible race and class aspects of ringtone consumption). Finally, Gopinath considers the attempt to rebrand ringtones as “mobile music” and the emergence of cloud computing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262315098
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	07/19/2013
Series:	The MIT Press
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	392
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xiii

I The Rise and Fall of the Ringtone Economy

1 This Business of Ringtones: The Unstable Value Chain and Accumulation of Capital by Rent in the Global Ringtone Industry 3

II Ramifications of the Ringtone's Identity Crisis: The Social and Cultural Fallout of Technological Transformation

2 Ringtones and the Deskilling of Mobile-Musical Labor: A Preliminary Investigation 57

3 Left Behind: Case Studies of Decline and Recapitulation in the Ringtone as Representation 81

4 The Ringtone and Its Aesthetic Subgenres in Contemporary Classical Music and Media Performance/Installation Art 101

III The Ringtone's Dialectical Reversals

5 The Annoying Thing: Crazy Frog and the Strange Career of a Sample 133

6 The Voice of the Politician and the Geographic Dispersion of the Political Ringtone 151

7 A Spectrum of Forms: The Aesthetic Logic of Original Sound-File Ringtone Composition 183

IV Revivals and the (Universal) Particularization of the Ringtone

8 Personalization and Spectatorship: The Ringtone's Narrative Functions in Cinematic and Televisual Media 205

9 What's in a Name? Race and the Ringtone's Revival in (Un-)Popular Music 241

Epilogue 269

Notes 281

Index 361

What People are Saying About This

David Suisman

There is no book like this. Politically, theoretically, and sonically engaged, The Ringtone Dialectic takes something of seemingly minor significance—cell phone ringtones—and uses it to explore the structure and dynamics of global capitalism. Gopinath raises the bar in the study of the political economy of sound.

Timothy D. Taylor

Sumanth Gopinath's The Ringtone Dialectic is a theoretically provocative and empirically rich study that should be read in music studies and far beyond.

Michael Bull

The Ringtone Dialectic ambitiously—and successfully—brings our understanding of the circuit of culture, articulated through a brilliant analysis of ringtones, into the twenty-first century. If you want to understand the global workings of a multi-billion-dollar digital culture on the move, then read this book.

Endorsement

The Ringtone Dialectic ambitiously—and successfully—brings our understanding of the circuit of culture, articulated through a brilliant analysis of ringtones, into the twenty-first century. If you want to understand the global workings of a multi-billion-dollar digital culture on the move, then read this book.

—Michael Bull, University of Sussex

From the Publisher

There is no book like this. Politically, theoretically, and sonically engaged, The Ringtone Dialectic takes something of seemingly minor significance—cell phone ringtones—and uses it to explore the structure and dynamics of global capitalism. Gopinath raises the bar in the study of the political economy of sound.

—David Suisman, author of Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music

Why should we care about ringtones? As The Ringtone Dialectic makes clear, we have good reason to care. In this perceptive and provocative study, Sumanth Gopinath uses the ringtone to offer fresh perspectives on the creation and consumption of music, the evolution of digital technologies, and the global trade of information. Full of fascinating case studies and insightful analysis, The Ringtone Dialectic probes the profound and lasting consequences of the short-lived multi-billion-dollar industry built on 30-second clips of music.

—Mark Katz, Chair, Department of Music, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ

Sumanth Gopinath's The Ringtone Dialectic is a theoretically provocative and empirically rich study that should be read in music studies and far beyond.

—Timothy D. Taylor, author of The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture

The Ringtone Dialectic ambitiously—and successfully—brings our understanding of the circuit of culture, articulated through a brilliant analysis of ringtones, into the twenty-first century. If you want to understand the global workings of a multi-billion-dollar digital culture on the move, then read this book.

—Michael Bull, University of Sussex

Mark Katz

Why should we care about ringtones? As The Ringtone Dialectic makes clear, we have good reason to care. In this perceptive and provocative study, Sumanth Gopinath uses the ringtone to offer fresh perspectives on the creation and consumption of music, the evolution of digital technologies, and the global trade of information. Full of fascinating case studies and insightful analysis, The Ringtone Dialectic probes the profound and lasting consequences of the short-lived multi-billion-dollar industry built on 30-second clips of music.

Editorial Reviews

With a certain dry humour mixed with the arch tones of mild scholarly disdain, reading Gopinath on 'the degraded pre-adolescent utopias' of the Crazy Frog tune can be a little like reading Glenn Gould blithely discussing the 'harmonic primitivism' of the Beatles. Nonetheless, this unique and often fascinating volume unearths a sufficient number of intriguing artistic responses to suggest that there may have been more to the ringtone as cultural form than Für Elise rendered in coarse FM synthesis and dididing ding bing bing.

—Art Review

...the most interesting parts of the book were those where Gopinath discusses the cultural aspects related to ringtones. Ringtones, Gopinath maintains, are aestheticized signals. Their function is to indicate, by means of sound, that the owner of the mobile phone is receiving a phone call. A simple beep would suffice to accomplish this task. Nevertheless, many phone user prefer to use another sound to indicate this, one that is aesthetically more pleasing. A Bach excerpt, for example.

—Journal of Sonic Studies

From the Publisher

...the most interesting parts of the book were those where Gopinath discusses the cultural aspects related to ringtones. Ringtones, Gopinath maintains, are aestheticized signals. Their function is to indicate, by means of sound, that the owner of the mobile phone is receiving a phone call. A simple beep would suffice to accomplish this task. Nevertheless, many phone user prefer to use another sound to indicate this, one that is aesthetically more pleasing. A Bach excerpt, for example.

—Journal of Sonic Studies

Reviews

...the most interesting parts of the book were those where Gopinath discusses the cultural aspects related to ringtones. Ringtones, Gopinath maintains, are aestheticized signals. Their function is to indicate, by means of sound, that the owner of the mobile phone is receiving a phone call. A simple beep would suffice to accomplish this task. Nevertheless, many phone user prefer to use another sound to indicate this, one that is aesthetically more pleasing. A Bach excerpt, for example.

Journal of Sonic Studies

With a certain dry humour mixed with the arch tones of mild scholarly disdain, reading Gopinath on 'the degraded pre-adolescent utopias' of the Crazy Frog tune can be a little like reading Glenn Gould blithely discussing the 'harmonic primitivism' of the Beatles. Nonetheless, this unique and often fascinating volume unearths a sufficient number of intriguing artistic responses to suggest that there may have been more to the ringtone as cultural form than Für Elise rendered in coarse FM synthesis and dididing ding bing bing.

Art Review