Don't ever try to make a real cellphone ring on
stage. There's no
practical, reliable, repeatable way to do it. The two most common options are to either use one of those toy cellphones that ring when you press a
button, or to fake it.
I've designed a couple shows where I've had to fake it, and it turns out very well if you put a
speaker for that
effect near where the actor will be standing. If it's a
proscenium venue, you can hide speakers in
props/set pieces, behind doors or windows,
etc. In a more flexible space, you can hang speakers directly over where the actor will be standing.
The last time I designed a show with a
cell ring was in a small in-the-round room with an overhead
grid. I placed a
speaker directly over the actor, aimed down at the
ground so as to diffuse the sound to the audience a
bit (you might also
play with aiming it at the ceiling to see which works better for your
effect in your space).
I found the ringer we wanted (we needed a specific song) on a ringtone site and downloaded a wav format sample of it, which was perfect, since it sounded like it was being played on a phone. You can also go the
MIDI route, composing it as a
MIDI file and recording that to a wave with the basic cheesy sounding samples that come with most computers, and then process it (particularly
EQing it appropriately) to sound like a phone, which will let you compose any ringer you like.
A
bit of careful
level setting in the
venue led to a very convincing effect--even good friends who should have known better came up to me after the show asking how we got the phone to ring on
cue!
--Andy