Nigerian-born songwriter and music producer, Ikwano, emerged as one of the winners in the recently concluded Nokia Middle East and Africa Regional Ringtone competition. As reported in an earlier blogpost, Nokia: Create a ringtone and win $1,500, Nokia put up a prize of $1,500 each for 5 people for creating creative ringtones. The ringtones had to reflect and celebrate local music culture and styles and should be suitable for use throughout the whole of Middle East and Africa region.
Ikwano, who sent in 7 entries, explains how his winning ringtone called Simply African was created:
“I drew my musical influences from across Africa. With very few exceptions from the North, music of African origin tends to be rhythmically rich and features more percussive elements than melodic elements.”
“For my percussive elements, I laid the foundation with the feet-stomping Big Drums from Southern Africa and the happy talking Djembe drums of West Africa. To tighten up the groove and inject some sway, I added the Afro-Brazilian Caxixi shaker and the Dumbak hand drums of Ancient Middle-East/North Africa. Then the cheerful semi-percussive Kalimba of East Africa came in to add some rhythmic character and form a tonal base for the “Igbo” royal flute which is the only purely melodic instrument in my composition.
“You’d also notice a Timpani roll and swell Cymbal at the lead-in and ending just to add a subtle orchestral herald.”
Ikwano says that the brief set by the competition, and the demands of creating a ringtone, changed the normal way of producing music:
“You had to follow the brief and produce a 30 second piece that must sound good on your exotic studio monitors as well as a lo-fi phone speaker. For a ringtone, I cared more how it sounded from phone speakers so I basically monitored the whole production process using a pair of Nokia earphones. On completion, I converted the mix to a low sample-rate mp3 and tested first on a small Nokia phone before checking the output on my studio monitors. Usually, it would have been the other way round.”
Nokia Sound Designer, Henry Daw, who organised the competition adds that Ikwano’s entries were “Traditionally based but produced in a very modern way, sounding fresh and contemporary.”
1 Comment
Awesome this is nice post.Thanks for sharing.