Old Nokia Ringtone -

If you hear the tune today, you are immediately struck by a wave of nostalgia. It is a "madeleine moment" for the digital age. That sound triggers memories of Snake II played on a green, pixelated screen, of predictive text mishaps, and of a time when leaving the house meant being unreachable until you found a landline. The ringtone represents a tether to the physical world that we have since lost in the age of constant connectivity.

Most people assume the old Nokia ringtone was a custom composition written by a Finnish engineer in a lab. They are wrong. The Nokia Tune is actually a bastardized, 1994-era digital transcription of a classical guitar piece called "Gran Vals" composed by Francisco Tárrega in 1902. old nokia ringtone