In American movies / TV shows, whenever the phone rings it always seems to sound the same. A very loud hollow sounding ring that anyone who has seen Ironside/Cannon/Hill Street Blues will recognise.
This sound does not seem to have changed in fifty years of films. In the UK we have many different ring tones. I just wondered, is this a standard Hollywood sound effect?
Although the duration and timing of the ring signal is pretty much standard, these days there are as many ringer sounds as there are phones. Very few telephones still feature an actual mechanical bell anymore; nearly all of them are low-REN electronic ringers.
Maybe the OP means the sound a caller hears when the phone is ringing. In that case, yes, the ring tone sounds the same almost everywhere in the United States. The ring tone also sounds the same in parts of Canada that I’ve called.
I remember a decade or so ago, if you made a phone call to an area served by a small, independent telephone company, the ringing on the caller’s end would sound more like a soft buzz than the standard melodic warble.
Of course those were all quite old shows mentioned in the OP, especially the first two. Back in the days of Cannon and Ironsides virtually all of us here still leased our home phones from the phone company. They all had real bells instead of an electronically generated ring, and yes, they all did sound pretty much the same.
As for how the ring sounds when you hear it at the other end, I’ve noticed that there are variations depending on the destination. My parents have lived in the same house all my life, and when I call them, their phone sounds the same way as it always have, a little “thicker” in quality than most rings. It must have something to do with the circuits in their area.
But one thing I always thought odd about TV shows, and for some reason this was done especially on the soaps my mother watched when I young, was how sometimes the remote ringing tone would sound not like a ring at all, but like someone softly snoring or snorting.
Canon, Columbo, Starsky and Hutch are all old shows, but I just watched About Schmidt tonight (great film by the way), and his phone sounded like it was sitting on some DA’s desk circa 1972