16B2 16A2 4B2 4E2 4- 8- 16C3 16B2 8C3 8B2, and so it goes…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
N<\/span>ow, that may seem like a pile of gibberish to you. But to me, about 12 years ago, it was the culmination of dozens of hours of hard work<\/a>, which, when entered into the \u201cringtone composer\u201d of a Nokia 3310, would play the first few notes of the iconic keyboard<\/a> intro to \u201cThe Final Countdown\u201d by Swedish rock band Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you are of a certain vintage, you\u2019d be forgiven for asking \u201cwhy take the trouble to do all that when you could just download the song?\u201d, or indeed, \u201cwhat is a Nokia 3310<\/a>?\u201d Heck, you could be excused for taking a minute to remember what a ringtone is \u2014 increasing mobile etiquette means you are more likely to hear the unmistakable \u201cwhrrrrr\u201d of a vibrating phone on a table rather than your favourite tune blaring for a few seconds every few hours. You could also argue that this itself is a rare occurrence these days, considering people prefer to text<\/a> than call (rightly so!). Meanwhile, with the advent of streaming, when was the last time any of us dealt with a music file at all, let alone took the effort of setting it as a tone?<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the world was different in 2004. Orkut<\/a> was popular. We flipped out over 512 MB memory cards. Back then, our phones<\/a> were fairly spartan \u2014\u00a0not just in terms of specs and features, but also in terms of options for entertainment. Unlike now, where we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to games and content, back then we had to find various ways of entertaining ourselves in whatever way we could.It\u2019s a silly thing to romanticise, I know, but it harks back to a simpler time, when we had to find ways to entertain ourselves.<\/blockquote>
Ringtones were one such potential well of creative expression. You could make your own \u2014 all you needed was some time and a ringtonable tune. And since being in the third year of an engineering college<\/a> provided an abundance of the former, it became a worthy pastime for some of us who didn\u2019t quite have the skill to play the intro to Californication on the guitar<\/a>. It was a neat way of showing off our \u201cevolved\u201d musical tastes. Here, for example, is what those weird notes I put at the top of this article sounded like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n