Roger Bourland
writes about music and life

Here is the Kakophone. The virtual online synthesizer to help you create the perfect ringtone for your cell phone. Let everyone know your true inner nature by crafting the perfect ring that will impress everyone.

I’m hoping in their 2.0 release they will incorporate speakerphone alternatives. When you are standing in a long line, your phone can go off and say: “Dr Bourland, you are needed in the operating room immediately. Dr. Bourland, you are…” and everyone around you will hear it letting you go to the front of the line, feeling they are helping the world by doing it. Or let’s say you’re in church, you could program ethereal voices that would go off every five minutes to say: “Roger, you are my chosen one. You must move to Wyoming and form a church.” Or in that interminable meeting, your speakerphone just happens to go off, and the group hears the message: “Honey, you’ve got to come home NOW, the dog has just broken his leg!” You could pretend to hysterically try to turn it off, but by then everyone has heard the message and big sad looks are everywhere: “Roger, you should go home and take care of your dog, we’ll carry on.”

Seriously, I don’t understand the ringtone craze. The music industry has embraced it fully as another income stream, and now every artist’s songs are available as terrible synthesized reductions. So while you are enjoying a quiet moment in a book store, some dude’s phone goes off full blast playing Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and my bubble bursts and am suddenly transported to a disco in 1978. Ringtones can do that––interrupt your reality. I look forward to the day that it is considered bad taste to even have one.