News reaches us that Oki Electric Industry have launched a new range of chips for mobile phones that plays 64 polyphonies simultaneously with eight octaves. If you are slightly lost with this, let us translate; a mobile phone equipped with one of these will be able to have a ringtone capable of playing music with up to 64 musical notes sounding at once, from a range of notes far greater than the human voice (as high as five octave is rare).
This is the third generation of Oki’s Swing’nRinger sound generators and doubles the number of notes that can play simultaneously. As with previous generations ships they will be programmable using MIDI files. Samples will be shipping from December this year and volume shipping will start in March 2004
It is interesting that the technology appears to be catching up with the views of the industry. In our discussions with people taking music in to the digital world, they have been muttering about the next stage in ringtones being complete music track singles being used as ringtones. This technology will bring the rendition of the music to a more familiar sound.