Cleartones — Fresh, Clean, Pleasant Sounds

Walking down the street, shopping at the mall, and riding on the metro, although typically unrelated, usually have one thing in common: the nearby noise of a horrendous, grating, brain-piercing ringtone.

Ringtones are meant to work as alarm clocks do; they’re designed to make you aware of their existence by being obnoxiously loud and demanding an immediate reaction. It’s unnecessary and, truthfully, the reason I’ve always kept my phone on silent. Until now, that is. Now, I have Cleartones.

Cleartones are ringtones reimagined. Hugo Verweij and Joachim Baan take something jarring and make it perfectly harmonious. Oftentimes, people are thoughtlessly applying snippets of their favorite songs or selecting a tone from the preloaded defaults (Marimba, anyone?), but Cleartones takes the strident nature of ringtones and redefines it with blissfully smooth-sounding alerts.

Cleartones offers two different collections of 50 ringtones and 50 notification tones (Classic and Organic). Both sets have an assortment of comforting tones made from precise sounds. Each tone pushes a melodious noise that’s all too foreign to those of us who’ve never heard minimal, elegant chimes through our eardrums. One tone, by itself, is outstanding… let alone 100 separate ones.

Cleartones manages to take something familiar and remix it into something new. Electronic-sounding noises like ringtones become dated and start to shred your ears like the finest of cheese graters. This set, however, seems timeless. Chimes, bells, wood, and glass — things that have been around for centuries — have ageless sounds, sounds that resonate melodies that can’t be replicated. Cleartones understands this idea and capitalizes on it. The results are literally music to your ears.

You can grab Cleartones for $17 or, in traditional Culture Milk fashion, you can enter a contest!

Follow Culture Milk on Twitter and write your own tweet that includes the hashtag #cleartones or click the button below and finish the sentence to automatically enter and have a chance at winning the entire Organic set of 50 ringtones and 50 notification tones! We will be choosing five (5) people on Tuesday, October 30th. Good luck!