M Ridzwan

I will never forget that night during a break when a female student ran out of the classroom in absolute haste. She was dead pale, panting and looked like every single ounce of blood had been drained from her face.

"Did you hear that? Did anybody hear that?" she was rambling on and on till one of us calmed her down. We then entered the classroom together to see what had gotten her so spooked.

True enough, the sound of shrieking laughter was clearly audible. It was a female voice, soft, sinister and looping ad infinitum. But worst of all, the source of the voice was nowhere to be seen in the somewhat dark classroom.

It was just about then that another student stepped in and apologised. He sheepishly went over to his bag, took out his mobile phone and answered the call. The laughter turned out to be just another spooky sounding ringtones. The bloke apparently had recorded a laughter sequence from one of those Pontianak movies and converted it into his ringtone.

Ringtones have come a long way since its monotonic origins. It used to be that simple undulating digital beeps were the only indications that someone was trying to contact you on your mobile phone. Now these can range anywhere from creepy animal sounds to the latest hits by the Black Eyed Peas.

The enabling technology behind this is polyphonic audio emission. It is the ability of a device to produce more than one note at a time and is achieved by synthesizers that range from 1 to 128 notes.

Also aiding the popularity are a number software that will allow you to convert your favourite sounds into your favourite ringtones.

A particularly good one that we identified is a converter application simply known as MP3 To Ringtones 1.28. It is a flagship product published by a Taiwanese software developer known as An Ming. The application has very little puff and features simple and clean user interfaces. You can use it to convert the popular audio formats like WAV to ringtone formats such as MMF and MP3.

What this means is that you can rip your favourite songs from a CD and let the software turn it into a ringtone. A neat feature unique to this application is that it allows a "seek" operation to rip only a favoured song section, like the chorus. The software is available for a free trial at http://www.ddz1977.com. Once the 30-day trial expires, it will cost you US$19.95.