Which is your personal favorite from this 2015 collection? Users also need quieter and less distracting tones like this one here, one of my early hits originally from 2005. While in China, people like more lively ringtones with more character.Īleksi: It is important to design tones that are simple enough. prefer minimalistic and discreet, overall. But now we see the trend is going towards simple, functional and discreet, but this is also very geographical.įor example people in the U.S. Tapio: I guess historically ringtones have been very music-like and catchy. Being curious and observant helps.ĭo you think ringtones should be hummable? Like this one time, I was watching modern ballet in Helsinki and there were a lot of inspiring themes for a musician.
Tapio: We need to be world-class experts in composition and music production, music trends, and at the same time you need to draw inspiration from everyday life around you. I have been a jazz fan since my teens and for the first time, as a part of this year’s tones update, I got to work with an acoustic jazz band. In the end it also needs some personal touch, because I think that is the only way the sounds can become meaningful to someone else. Some sounds may age gracefully, but for example electronic music styles come and go so quickly that we refresh those more often.
A whole lot can feed in into the creative process and we then try to complete sets that are just the right size and still cater to most people. Where do you get inspiration to create the tones?Īleksi : Overall, we must be on top of the current trends in music and sound design, and we try to follow what sounds people are actually choosing as their ringtones. Maybe you couldn’t recognize the difference, but you can feel it.
Real orchestra, real acoustic jazz band, real sauna, real wind chimes, real cats.įor example this simple ringing sound was actually played by a professional percussionist, not a synthesizer. Offering quality cat food supply for a year helped and after some hard negotiations we finally got their paw signatures in the voice actor contract.Īleksi: No matter what the sound is, we prefer the real thing as opposed to a sound library effect or a sample. It took quite some patience, and both animal attendant and sound designer skills to capture just the right meows.
Usually they talk a lot, but when I approached them with a portable recorder they went totally silent. Then for this new version called “Two Cats”, we have a lot more meows and some purring featuring the two cats I now have at home. For the first tone, which was recorded three years ago, we only had one meow as at the time I only had one cat.
How do you go about creating new versions of existing ringtones, like “Cats”?Īleksi: There is a story behind these cats. The basic thinking is that when people buy Microsoft Lumia phones, everyone will find a tone that they are comfortable having – whether it is ringtones or alarm clock or notification sounds.įor this, we collect information from people across the world and refer to different studies which help us form what audio sets we wish to have. Tapio: We have an internal sound design team who focus on human-centric and people-centric sound design. What was the idea behind these ringtones? What’s your process for composing new tones? We asked Tapio and Aleksi about creating the new ringtones. The recently launched Lumia 830, Lumia 735 and Lumia 730 come with a freshly updated ringtone set, thanks to Tapio Hakanen, Head of Phones Sound Design at Microsoft and Aleksi Eeben, Principal Sound Designer and the creative lead for this year’s update. Thanks to our soulful sound specialists, you have plenty of tunes to flaunt. Similar to how our shiny and bright Lumia smartphones complement our style, the ringtones we choose help define our personality.