The Days Of 2100

During the 2004 monsoon I think it was...Monophonic cellphones had a wow factor of their own. Ok, they sucked in terms of resolution capability and the monochrome outlay on the screen but the beauty of these phones was the inbuilt ringtone composer which, for its time in technology, supported enough to cover a range of tracks. I had my share of unlimited fun with this feature.

Tempo,pitch,notes (with majors and minors too) were at hand to be exploited. I'm sure everyone had a look at it once during their 'basic' cellphone experience. Songs from that period found themselves jotted in the syntax format over scrap pages of an old torn Hello Kitty kinda copy. Don't ask me why that was lying around the house. Anyway, so I thought I'd go about building an entire portfolio of these tracks. (This doesn't mean my faith in our ability to advance technologically was arrested)
A single track took about 20min to type out in the required 'code'.

I'd play it back then - cell in hand, eyeing the ceiling and the flimsy nodding of the head with the beat - checking for any irregularities in the output. Of course there were glitches. Back to the editor to correct it. Play it again. Something's out of line. Replay. Ah..got it! A task completed & a song 'conquered'. Silly, but sometimes I'd think, "Naahh.. it doesnt really sound good on a cell phone." Chucked out. There and then. Onto a more apt title and start over.

These days, its simple. I get my mp3, throw it in the cutter/ripper and slice out a portion of the song I want to use. You know, the time scales are alterable. Maybe you can add some fade-in or fade-out for that enhanced audio. Normalize the output though. I stand by uniformity at all costs. And all this takes a lot less than 25min. The merriment and sense of (micro)achievement is missing.

More like snip-set-paste..and voila!