Album Review: Apple Ringtones
A thorough examination of the 26 standard Apple ringtones and Owl City’s unexpected influence on them.
Written and illustrated by Mark Yoder
The innovation of the smartphone removed the necessity of many tools such as calculators, maps and phones with more than two buttons. Among the devices that were rendered partially obsolete by smartphones are alarm clocks. Instead of having to worry about keeping a bulky alarm clock plugged in on your nightstand, an alarm could just be set on a phone. Along with this convenience, the phones include a feature that most alarm clocks do not possess: the ability to pick from a library of short ringtones, providing a personalized way to wake up. Apple took advantage of this early on with the iPhone by including a large selection of ringtone choices. Apple’s original ringtone list had many strange and off-putting options, such as a dog barking, a pinball machine being used, and the unintelligible muttering of a robot. These ringtones were fine, but many of them created a pretty unpleasant listening experience.
Along with the release of iOS 7 in 2013 came a new set of ringtone options, and the previous sounds were tucked away in a folder entitled “Classic.” From a musical perspective, the 26 new ringtones were a drastic improvement from the original selection.
Apple has done a pretty good job at keeping the authorship of these ringtones shrouded in mystery, but many fans of electro-pop sensation Adam Young — also known as Owl City, creator of the timeless insomniac anthem “Fireflies” — heard these tracks and could not help but make comparisons to his work. And the plot thickened when Owl City himself put “Apple Sounds” on his official discography, later taking it down presumably on Apple’s request. But this information only creates more questions. Why is Apple so keen on keeping this a secret? Could this group of songs be counted as an unofficial Owl City album? How would these songs play as listened to like an album?
Based on the presumption that these ringtones are an unofficial Owl City album, this review will be examining this group of tones as an album and measure their success from a purely musical standpoint, not how effective they are at waking someone up. So, without further ado let's jump in.
The very first track on the project is “Apex,” which features a simple noisy synth that echoes heavily for a short amount and sounding strangely distant. The next track, “Beacon,” doesn’t make much of an impression and is a repeating note that decreases in volume. “Bulletin” is a pleasant first taste to the motif of bells and other tuned percussion featured throughout the project’s runtime. The fourth song, entitled “By the Seaside,” is jarring, to say the least. It features a cheesy lead melody over jaunty accordion stabs, resulting in something that sounds like the perfect backing for a rejected Wii Sport, like croquet. But this is only a short detour — the next track, “Chimes,” loops back to the atmospheric nature of the first few tracks with a simple wind chime synth line.
After this, we are introduced to another musical motif featured heavily on the project through “Circuit”: repeating synth arpeggios. “Constellation” also uses similar echoing arpeggios along with ethereal synth bells to create a beautifully dreamy result that is undoubtedly one of the highlights of the project. Tracks like these, as well as tracks like “Night Owl,” “Radiate,” and “Waves,” are where the Owl City association can be heard most clearly through ambient echoing effects and repetitive arpeggios played by percussive synths. Each track feels as though it could be easily built into legit Owl City tracks with the simple addition of Young’s pop vocals and a beat. But outside of this effective formula, there are quite a few duds on the album.
Tracks like “Hillside” and “Signal” are fairly one-note and are overall mostly forgettable. “Playtime” has a similarly obnoxious energy to “By the Seaside,” but sounds like it could be the theme song for a TV show for toddlers. “Radar” is the lowest moment of the project with a simple high-frequency repeating note that quickly gets quieter. Something about it is unexplainably unsettling, and it is probably one of the most universally hated pieces of audio of all time (side note: anyone who uses this as their daily alarm needs to be watched very carefully). Unfortunately, these blemishes in an otherwise pristine atmospheric soundscape hold the project back from being a truly enjoyable listening experience.
It may be a stretch to call this an Owl City album, unofficially or otherwise, but it is a musical project that Young claims to have had his hand in, and his influence can be clearly heard on a good number of tracks. In the context of Owl City’s discography, this collection of songs is hard to place. It is certainly not his most compelling or personal work, with one of its core elements being its extreme simplicity. But when considering the billions of iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches that have been sold to date, and the fact that even six years after the release of iOS 7, these 26 songs remain as the default ringtone options across all Apple devices (with hundreds of millions of people waking up to one of these songs every single day), it begs the question whether it might be his most significant project to date. And almost no one knows he was behind it.