In April of 2007, KFC Featured the Mosquito Ringtone in a type of viral interactive commercial. They were giving away (1000) $10 gift cards to the first thousand people that could correctly state at what point in the commercial the ultra sonic sound was played. I don’t know if it is part of the YouTube conversion process, but it’s pretty obvious where the sound is played.

See the original KFC press release

We’ve come up with a really easy way to get the Mosquito Ringtones on your iPhone for free…. All you have to do is add our Teen Buzz ringtones podcast feed to iTunes. It so shocking easy, I am surprised that people haven’t started podcast ringtone webstes yet. First you need to have iTunes on your computer and click our Teen Buzz / Mosquito Ringtones podcast feed in order to get the ring tones into iTunes.

After clicking the link, a feed will appear in your podcast folder in iTunes.

Click on the arrow next to the Podcast to display all of the ringtones.

Click the frequency of the ultra sonic ring tone that you want to put on your iPhone, or select them all!

And finally, your ringtones should appear in your ringtones folder. If a ringtones folder does not appear, connect your iPhone to your computer

Your ringtones will be available on your iPhone the next time you sync it with iTunes.

After dismantling an iPhone to remove the speaker and test it out, I found out that it works great and plays all the tones properly when connected directly to the PC’s speaker out port, the limitation I talked about earlier must exist within the iPhone software right? Wrong….sorta, it turns out that there was defiantly something going on with my iPhone when I tried to play any tone higher than 14khz from the official source of the Teen Buzz mosquito ringtone website. I just had to figure out what the problem was, the tones listed were all created with an audio utility program called Audacity, so I downloaded the program to see if there were any additional settings I might have missed but it appears I didn’t miss any. I searched and found tone generation software called NCH Tone Generator and I proceeded to create another set of mosquito ringtones to see if these would work on my iPhone. They worked great!

I am not sure if it something to do with the encoding built into Audacity or with the software on the iPhone itself. Either way, they are working now on the iPhone through the Safari browser and through the media player.

This “frequency” ringtone goes by a bunch of different names depending on where you hear about it. It’s simply a small sound file a few seconds in length and typically, not very large in terms of file size. The very first implementation of the ring tone was at the 17khz frequency. This is the same frequency that Howard Stapleton used in his device called The Mosquito.

Soon after the release of information about Mr. Stapleton’s device surfaced, people created ringtones in all sorts of different frequencies. The upper range for mp3 files is 22khz and there are thousands of different possible frequencies in the range of 17khz to 22khz. People quickly learned/remembered that kids were able to hear things at an even higher pitch frequency. Whether you call it the mosquito ringtone, teen buzz, ultra sonic ringtone, or the ringtone adults can’t hear, they are all the same thing; The ringtone that only kids can hear.

We at Free Mosquito Ringtones offer a variety of frequencies in different formats for use with your cell phone. Download your free ring tones in the format and frequency of your choice.

The iPhone has been a huge success from Apple with many people loving their iPhone so much that they could never go back to using an ordinary cell phone, myself included. But does the mosquito ring tone work on the iPhone? I ran a few tests with the Teen Buzz ringtone and my iPhone to find out!

First I went to the source for Teen Buzz on my iPhone to see how the website works and if the files would play in the Safari browser, and of course they do (you have to use the direct mp3 link — green download buttons. No flash player for the iPhone yet).

The Bad News

It appears that the iPhone is limited to somewhere between 14khz and 15khz as the 15khz tone does not play correctly on the iPhone. Perhaps Apple did this purposely to prevent people from using higher pitched ringtones, to prevent damage to the phone’s internal speakers and/or people’s ears!? I can’t find any references to the capabilities of the speaker in the iPhone itself or to any studies about the long term affects of hearing mosquito ringtone like sounds for any lenght of time.

If you want to use the 14khz tone, which most people 50 and younger can hear, you will still need a third party ringtone application for the iPhone, as Apple prevents you from using any ringtones on the device except those that you buy from iTunes.

Does anyone have any more specific information out there about speaker capabilites on the iPhone and why things over 14khz will not play? Please share your thoughts and comments! After this Easter break I will have time to figure out the exact high range limitation of the iPhone. I will also release results on whether this is a hardware or software limitation.

Update: You can view my update to this here: iPhone Speaker information