A chord is a combination of three or more simultaneous or sequential voicings in accordance with certain intervals, called a "chord". Traditional harmony is based on the principle of triadic superposition. Usually they are voiced at the same time. When you press 1, 3, and 5 on the piano at the same time, you sound a major triad with 1 as the root note. The advantage of this chord is that it has a rich and expressive sound. A major triad sounds very loud, while a minor triad sounds subdued.
The so-called electronic music midi format is a record of the timbre, name, loudness, angle, and time of each note, which is then queried in a sound library to get the sound that should be emitted. Simply put, each track corresponds to a musical instrument, on which the musical notes played by that instrument at each moment are recorded in a specific format. For example, if at a certain moment the track defined as a piano has the chords composed of 135 as mentioned above, then the chip will query the sound bank to get the corresponding sound, then synthesize and play it back. So the tonebank is a key factor in whether the midi sounds good, and a good tonebank takes up a lot of space.
The way you record music on a cell phone is the same or similar to a midi. All that is recorded is monophony, and complex chord sounds are not recorded. If this is the case, why do our cell phones still sound so good? Since you can't press "135" on a piano at the same time, you can just press 1, 3, and 5 on three pianos at the same time. In fact, that's exactly how cell phone chords are realized, and although such chords don't sound as good as real chords, they are almost as good as the real thing when you play them from a cell phone. This process of turning a chord on one instrument into a single note on n instruments seems to be called "chord decomposition". If you often use psmplay to convert ringtones on your cell phone, then when the midi being converted is complex, it will say "Chord breaks over 16...". Similarly, a lot of tunes that sound good on the computer sound a lot worse when you transfer them directly to your phone without breaking them down. All you have to do is look at it with better midi editing software to see that there are often many tracks of the same timbre within a song, each one monophonic.
So a phone with 16 chords can make five instruments sound like a triad at the same time, while a phone with 40 chords can make five instruments sound like a seventh chord at the same time, or thirteen instruments sound like a triad at the same time, or ..... "The more chords there are, the more possible combinations, the richer the sound. This is where the number of chords on a cell phone makes all the difference.
At present, the ringtones of cell phones sold on the domestic market can be roughly divided into monophonic ringtones, 3 chords, 4 chords, 16 chords, 32 chords, 40 chords, 64 chords and other ringtones. The difference between monophonic and chordal sounds is big; 4 chord ringtones and 16 chord sounds are too monophonic and the difference is big, 40 chord and 32 chord ringtones don't have much difference, while 64 chord and 40 chord have a big difference. In short, 3 and 4 chords are a class apart, 16 chords are a class apart, 32 and 40 chords are a class apart, and 64 chords are a class apart.
To differentiate between chords, the average consumer has no way to hear, because our ears are not professionally trained, if we can hear how many chords, how many chords in the song, then everyone can be a musician. Chords are just a way of embellishing a piece of music, and it's not true that the more chords you have, the better the piece will sound.