I noticed that there are a bunch of silent ringtones available for purchase in iTunes. At first you think, why would you want a ringtone that made no noise, but actually it's just a simple workaround for the binary operation of the global mute switch on the iPhone where you either have no sound or all sounds.

So, if you want to stop your phone from ringing but want to still have it chirp when you get an email, or some other message alert, then a silent ringtone is what you need.

What was odd was the fact that there are a number of silent ringtones available from different publishers, all for 99p. Obviously they're all silent - I'm assuming - and therefore exactly the same and so I guess it's just easy money to put up a silent ringtone for sale and live with the chance that someone will buy your silence and not someone else's silence.

Which is somewhat lacking in imagination, I thought.

So, what would be cool and would standout from all the other silent ringtones would be actual recorded silences captured from rests in famous songs.

For example; you could capture the second's worth of silence that occurs at 0:06 into the Beatles' song 'When I'm Sixty-Four' and edit it to make it repeat a few times to create the required few seconds of silence for your ringtone.

Only, this silence would be a special kind of silence and would evoke the fab four at their Sgt. Pepper's creative peak in a chilly December 1966 at the EMI recording studio in west London. Listen closely and you can just make out the smouldering cigaratte that John Lennon had just placed in the ashtray atop the recording studio piano moments before, and a barely muted stress fart from Ringo as he measures the fraction of a second timing before he then recommences drumming.

I'd pay 99p for that kind of silence.

This raises some interesting questions of a DMCA variety. Is it copyright theft to steal and resell the silence from Beatles records, or the last five seconds of silence in Nirvana's 'Something In The Way'?