Nokia tune
musical composition
The Nokia tune is a phrase from a composition for solo guitar, Gran Vals, composed in 1902 by the Spanish classical guitarist and composer Francisco Tárrega. It has been associated with Finnish corporation Nokia since the 1990s, becoming the first identifiable musical ringtone on a mobile phone; Nokia selected an excerpt to be used as its default ringtone.
While the ringtone initially shipped as monophonic, this was eventually replaced with polyphonic and audio versions, as a result of evolving mobile technology. It is written in the key of A major.
History
In 1992, Nokia used a 1989 rendition of Francisco Tárrega's Gran Vals by Czech guitarist Lubomír Brabec as the background music in a commercial for the Nokia 1011. The excerpt of Gran Vals used includes the phrase that would later be used for the Nokia tune ringtone. In 1993 Anssi Vanjoki, then-executive vice president of Nokia, showed the entirety of Gran Vals to Lauri Kivinen (then-head of corporate communications) and together they selected the excerpt that became "Nokia tune". The excerpt is taken from measures (bars) 13–16 of the piece.
The Nokia tune first appeared on the Nokia 2110 released in 1994, under the name ringtone Type 5, showing that it was just one of the normal ringtones. The tune's original name varied in the ringtone list, listed as Type 13 on some phones, or Type 8 on others.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nokia tune” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.