Polyphonic ringtones are the immediate successor of Monophonic ringtones and the immediate predecessor to Full Music ringtones. Polyphonic technology was introduced in the year 2000 in Japan. These ringtones have multiple tones that can be played simultaneously using instrument sounds such as guitar, drums, piano etc. The difference between a regular monophonic ringtone and a polyphonic ringtone is equivalent to the difference between a solo flute player and the whole orchestra. Polyphonic ringtone is much more sophisticated than regular monophonic ringtone because the former emulates real sounds through a song rather than a beeping sound.

More than 40 individual notes with different instruments can be played once in case of polyphonic ringtone, making it a more affective alert to the mobile user.

Polyphonic ringtones are compiled in the form of Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) format. Some downloadable ringtones are free.

Cell phone manufacturers use different MIDI files, each having a different CPU capacity and a different level of polyphony, which may be problematic to uniform ringtone composers for all types of MIDI files. To overcome this problem, cell phone producers have been using Scalable Polyphony MIDI (SP-MIDI) since 2002 for enabling the composer to create a single version of a song so that the phone will support multi-note polyphony ranging from 4 to 24 notes.

One development with respect to polyphonic ringtones is the Polyphonic Wizard. This allows the mobile owner to add new polyphonic ringtones and also some pictures to the phone without the need for cables or Short Message Services (SMS). If the software of the Polyphonic Wizard is installed, the cell phone owner can have polyphonic ringtones and pictures, too!