Some cellphones let people record an MP3 music track, so the caller hears the music instead of the usual ringing signal. But the sound quality is awful because cellphones are designed to mute background noise in the gaps between spoken words.
Now Young Nam, Seop Park, Tae Ha and Yun Jeon of Seoul are filing a patent application (US 2004/128126) with an answer. Software in the phone doctors the music from the MP3 card by artificially boosting the volume in the quiet troughs between percussive peaks. The phone’s speech circuit does not detect gaps, and so does not mute them.…
