A CALL FOR PERSONAL EXPRESSION.

Byline: - Sandra Barrera

On a hot June day outside the food court of the Northridge Fashion Center, Karan Chadda, an 18-year-old from North Hills, calls up a Punjabi club banger (a dance song) on his Motorola handset.

He recently downloaded the track from a CD using Motorola's Mobile Phone Tools, a software program that is popular among his circle of friends because it allows them to create their own ringtones.

``Nowadays,'' he says, ``it's all about who has the most original ringtone.''

Being original used to mean being seen in public with a big, heavy cell phone whose battery would get so hot that it burned. But that was then.

As the years went on and cell phones increasingly got smaller, they also got more sophisticated.

Today more and more people are updating their handsets to sleeker models that allow them to customize rings with snippets of music, movie lines, even funny messages left on voicemail.

It's easy enough. Ringtones are everywhere, whether you buy yours from a carrier or create one using special software.

For 18-year-old Harpreet Sidhu of North Hills, the sound his phone makes is practically guaranteed to get a laugh.

He chooses a voice snippet that he downloaded off his voice mail of a gravelly throated man asking, ``Are you still touching me?''

``That ringtone has gone off in class before,'' Sidhu chuckles. ``I didn't know what to do. Everyone was just looking at me, busting up.''

The fact is that ringtones go off everywhere, from public restroom stalls to business meetings, the latter of which David W. Stewart, professor of marketing at the USC Marshall School of Business, tells his students is bad etiquette.

``I just find that rude,'' he says.

It can also single out a person, which is what Sidhu says he wants.

``If you have something original, people are actually interested,'' he says. ``They're like, 'Who's that?' ''

Billboard has even started keeping tabs on the top-selling ringtones, to the horror of some critics.

``If this is our music industry today, if this is where we're headed while the record labels are suing their customers and the radio stations can't figure out how to attract the young listener, these ringtones might actually be the precursor to the demise of music and the music-related entertainment industry as we know it,'' says Jerry Del Colliano, clinical professor of music industry and recording arts at the USC Thornton School of Music.

Of course, not everybody buys into paying for rings.

``My ringtones are cool enough,'' says Joe Hatch, a 21-year-old from Los Angeles, referring to the rings that come standard on his Samsung phone.

He removes the silvery handset from his pocket and selects what sounds like game music from ``Super Mario Bros.'' but isn't.

A teen sitting at a nearby kiosk in the mall smirks.

On her phone, Savannah Dittman, a 17-year-old from Encino, has a huge collection of ringtones that includes ``Ghostbusters,'' as well as snippets by Tenacious D and Aerosmith.

She likes to organize her phone by assigning different people different ringtones.

``For my ex-boyfriend, I had 'Another One Bites the Dust,' '' she says, offering up just one example. ``I have ringtones that fit all my friends' personalities. If my phone wasn't dead right now, I'd show you.''