Apple’s ringtones are well crafted and charming. Most people have the same one.
I understand why they are kept on rails. The constraint guarantees the result sounds good, and it gives phones in the same room a family resemblance. It did not stop me wanting my own. Making a simple ringtone could not be that difficult.
I wanted a tool that made something with the depth and whimsy of Apple’s ringtones, fun to play with and easy enough that anyone could make their own. The eight rows are scale degrees instead of a chromatic keyboard, so there is no wrong note to place. That constraint lets two minutes of fiddling produce something you would set as your ringtone.
It has kept growing since, through layers. I used v1 to make the one on my phone. v2 has far more in it: struck-bar voices with their own overtones instead of plain oscillators, three parts instead of one, repeats that develop rather than repeat. Somewhere in all of that, it stopped making ringtones.
The Random button produces short game music now. The Mario and Zelda register. I did not aim at that, and no single change caused it: notes locked to a scale so nothing can clash, short bright percussion that holds up at speed, phrases that state an idea and then answer it. Each went in for its own unrelated reason. Together they are the conditions for a game loop, which makes the output reproducible rather than a lucky seed. The thirty-second cap and the WAV export are the only parts still about ringtones.
WIP