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In mid October 2002, a Welsh man and woman in their thirties who lived near the town of Aberdare waited at the Green Street Methodist Church with their respective families in tow. It was 3 p.m., and the organist had failed to turn up for the couple’s wedding service. The groom’s close friend, a 35-year-old roofer by the name of Darren Medd, had just purchased a new Samsung T300 mobile phone equipped with 16-voice polyphony and the ability to download ringtones; he knew the phone had a ringtone version of “Here Comes the Bride,” probably as a preset already on the phone.1 Before the service, Medd had played the ringtone for a couple of minutes, “with everyone laughing.” When the organist failed to show, he held his mobile phone to the microphone at the altar and played it again. The bride, Tracy Muxworthy, marched in double time to the up-tempo rendition of the wedding staple, and giggled as she approached the groom, Ian Davies. The organist, it turns out, had been told that the wedding was at 4 p.m.; “he arrived in time for the hymns and to play the voluntary as the couple left the church.”2 The couple, a pair of social workers, were married in front of more than 80 guests, surely thankful for Medd’s handy resource. This brief tale is, on the one hand, clearly a product of the present-day digital world, the inhabitants of which walk around regularly with musicplaying devices—their phones—and in which, one might add, few might actually be able to perform “Here Comes the Bride” on an organ. However, the moment is also marked by the fact that polyphonic ringtones were relatively new in the United Kingdom at that point, having first emerged only a year to two years earlier, and that they could produce a passable rendition of a piece of music for use in a wedding service (if eliciting a few laughs in the process). Perhaps less obviously, the music used in the service, a famous English adaptation of the bridal chorus (“Treulich geführt”) from the opening of Act 3 of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin (1850), 3 Left Behind: Case Studies of Decline and Recapitulation in the Ringtone as Representation 82 Chapter 3 is not often heard as a polyphonic ringtone, despite its ubiquity in other contexts (and, indeed, as a monophonic ringtone). Although only a few years earlier preset monophonic ringtones often featured chestnuts of the Western classical repertory, by the early 2000s the ringtone industry was in full swing, and large numbers of phone owners were seeking to replace their monophonic and polyphonic preset ringtones with new ones of their choice—typically ringtone arrangements of popular songs. Although classical preset ringtones did persist into the polyphonic phase, the “moment” of Western classical music on ringtones was the monophonic period, which had by and large already passed. Moreover, the ease with which one could alter a ringtone and the means to do so changed in the polyphonic period. Gone were the old monophonic text-entry editors, through which one could input a ringtone of choice; in their stead, for-pay portals accessed via Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) on phones became the primary way of changing one’s ringtone, at least in Europe and North America. In observing such a moment as an historical event, we can see that it heralds the arrival of a new technological form and its incorporation into everyday social life. But, one may ask, in these moments, what happens to the older technological form that was supplanted? Following Gil Rodman, we might posit that the prejudice in favor of examining leading-edge technologies often obscures the fates of trailing-edge technologies, which quickly become unusable or unfashionable on account of the planned obsolescence of upgrading.3 Disappearing from view while still often existing in a diminished capacity (or diffusing out from regions dominated by economic processes associated with the core zones to the semi-peripheral and peripheral ones), trailing-edge technologies and the social practices they engender are not only worthy of study in and of themselves; in addition, they also often help to place the new technologies and practices in historical context and provide opportunities for demonstrating continuities and possible points of origination.4 In the case of the ringtone , the present chapter takes practices and qualities associated with the monophonic ringtone—the relative ease of manually inputting a ringtone...

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