Mosquito ring tone

I have written about the Cellware.com site in the past. It’s a company that offers free ring tones that you can download to your cellphone. I have received the occasional e-mail from them marketing other things they offer but they haven’t been pests and it sure beats giving up $2.99 a tone to Verizon.

The point of this post is to tell you about one of the tones we came across today. The Mosquito ring tone is an exceptionally high-pitched tone designed to be heard by young people.

According to a New York Times article about the ring tone, the super high pitch came to America from Britain, where shopkeepers would use a tone generator to annoy teens and keep them from loitering around outside their businesses. It wasn’t long after that when somebody flipped it around and made it into a ring tone only kids should be able to hear.

Never one to believe things at face value, I decided to put the ring tone to the test in the official Chronicle lab – the newsroom.

It went something like this:

I scanned the room for the most seasoned reporter (I wouldn’t say old, that might be a bit offensive) I could find, so I settled on Steve Fogarty. And guess what? He didn’t believe I was playing anything at all when I asked him to listen. He was wise not to trust me but, on this particular occasion, the pained faces of several younger co-workers backed me up.

While the test did prove that the ring tone is hard to hear by those in certain demographics, it was by no means 100 percent. I could hear it, and I’m 41. I guess the best advice would be to use this ring at your own risk. If you use it in school and your teacher happens to have good hearing, you could be in trouble.