Yorkshire Composer's Homage to Mobile Phone

A composer from West Yorkshire has released a single, ‘Ringtonic', which is unique in its being constructed from the sounds of telephone noises and mobile phone ringtones. The track uses various telephone ringing sounds, text message alerts, dial-tones and even a speech sample of an announcer telling people to switch off their mobile phones.

In particular the track features the ubiquitous Nokia tune (originally a fragment from a 19th century classical guitar piece by Spanish composer Francisco Tarrega) which has been re-constructed using a software emulation of the early 1980s Casio VL 1 keyboard. The track also uses sounds derived from the Gameboy and Commodore 64 to create the right kind technological aesthetic.

The track has been produced by, and released via, MadeinMIDI, a production label set up by Mark Marrington in 2009.  Marrington, who lives in Hebden Bridge and is a Lecturer in Popular Music at Leeds College of Music, describes the record as "an affectionate tribute to mobile phone culture, the music that we hear all around us on a daily basis, particularly on public transport, but hitherto unstructured as a concentrated listening experience".

"I've deliberately used instrument sounds that refer to what we would these days regard as rather primitive music technology", says Marrington, "and I find it fascinating that these sounds have persisted with us in certain areas of technology like the telephone".  "The music is 95% original, but sounds like it could have been used in a videogame from the nineteen-eighties."

The single has been released under the pseudonym ‘Citron Gin' (an anagram of ‘Ringtonic') a character who Marrington describes as "a pioneer of the Hebden Bridge bitbeat scene".  ‘Bitbeat' is a variation on ‘Chipbeat', which refers to the current retro-fad for creating music using  sounds derived from 1980s videogame technology, ‘bit' referring to the 8-bit computer processor which produced the sounds in that era.

For more information about ‘Ringtonic', and to hear the single online, visit www.ringtonictune.com. To schedule an interview with Mark Marrington email madeinmidi@gmail.com

Contact email: mdmarrington@googlemail.com