Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'

From: James Guthrie interview

> Another piece that worked better than expected was the telephone operator. Roger was keen to illustrate the personal disconnect of being on the road. We were in L.A. at Producer’s Workshop so I phoned my neighbour, Chris Fitzmorris in London. He had the keys to my flat and I asked him to go there and said that I would call him through an operator. “No matter how many times I call”, I said, “just pick up the phone, say ‘Hello’, let the operator speak and then hang up”. I placed a telephone in a soundproof area, got on to an extension phone and started recording to ¼” tape. It took a couple of operators – the first 2 were a bit abrupt, but the 3rd was perfect. I told her that I wanted to make a collect call to Mrs. Floyd. “Who’s calling?” she asked. “Mr. Floyd”, I replied. Chris’s timing was terrific, over and over he would hang up just at the right moment and she became genuinely concerned. “Is there supposed to be someone there besides your wife?” I was playing her along saying things like “No! I don’t know who that is!” “What’s going on?” and she would try the call again. Unwittingly, she was helping to tell the story. Afterwards I went through the ¼” and edited my voice out, just leaving her and Chris. I sometimes wonder if she ever heard herself on the record.

Source: https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/jame...

On the cassette tape version of The Wall I had if you flipped the cassette over during this phone call sequence it would end up being right in the middle of another song (can't remember which one) which has this recording playing as part of the background. I feel like it couldn't have been intentional but who knows.

So we know a couple of digits and the splice points. We also know the date. Phone numbers used to be public back then.

It would be fun to grep for the pattern in the matching phone book to see if someone in Pink Floyd's circles comes up.

Only problem is to get hold of a digital version of the phone book. It strikes me as odd how hard it is to retrieve information that used to be so ubiquitous.

Not too long ago police in Germany asked publicly for information about certain phone numbers related to the Madeleine McCann case. Apparently not even the police has an archive of old phone books.

This brings back memories of being a clueless script kid in the 1990s.

I knew those tones as CCITT5 tones.

In the days of blueboxing I had a 486 laptop that I acquired because the harddrive died and booted from floppys, a DOS program called 'The Little Operator' that played tones and a photocopy of a book about telephone switching.

Young Lust is the song where this operator is heard.

Not being an audiophile, it took me some time to figure out the specific song. My brother had The Wall album, and I enjoyed it, but I never listened to it on my own. I went back and listened to it again for the context.

I really enjoy music but I don't listen to it as often I'd like. I think part of the reason is that I have difficulty concentrating when there is audio in the background. Some of my software engineer co-workers can turn on music or a video while they work, but I'm more productive in silence.

> record a real telephone in the US and accurately capture the feeling of a long-distance call

Aside from the signalling, it would be tricky to mimic the tinny hollow sound that came on a long-distance analog connection. Sideband modulation used to reduce the bandwidth, which requires an accurate local oscillator to reconstruct, lest the voice acquire a hint of Donald Duck. Hundreds of channels each separated by a few hundred Hz of gap, all slightly bleeding into each other, the warble of modems and murmur of other speakers making noise that's not exactly white noise in the background, a propagation delay of tens of milliseconds producing an audible electronic echo/ringing, etc. Lots of people at the time would have been familiar with that sound, and it would have been hard to fake.

Related:

Pink Floyd's 'The Wall': A Complete Analysis

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42402981

> https://telephoneworld.org/landline-telephone-history/pink-f...

Doesn't the internet still have some pretty places?

A while back I tracked down the video clip from the show Gomer Pyle that was used for the “But there's somebody else that needs taking care of in Washington” background audio.

Seeing that in its original context was jarring

> The number itself was probably made-up: it's too short and the area code doesn't seem valid.

44 is the country code for the UK.

Odd that the author thinks this sequence originated with the movie, when it's present on the album. He says "we know the number is" such and such without saying how.

Hilarious. As a teen I knew that sequence sounded exactly like MF signaling one would expect on an international call. It was common knowledge of high school hackers that it had recently been straightforward to use a "blue box" to make free calls using that kind of tone but that it was quite difficult by 1985 or so to find places in the network where it would work inside CONUS.

(Phreakers in the late 1980s were frequently "carders" who stole MCI account numbers by methods such as systematic dialing, not to mention my favorite tactic of taking over an answering machine to change the message to "this number accepts all third party and collect calls" which will strike terror into a dentist office or church or other victim when they find out)

Soon after the album came out, a morning DJ on one of the FM rock stations in Syracuse NY figured out the number and called it. They had a brief conversation before being hung up on. The DJ would play that conversation from time to time on the air.

Not sure if it's been mentioned but 1831 on a keypad makes a triangle, or a prism, if you will.

And what us the number in Knocking on Heavens door, the Guns n'roses version?

Is there an AI trained on touch tone and other telephony signals? It would be kind of fun to decode historical tones in music and film more easily

Nice; Now do an analysis of The Telephone Call by Kraftwerk on the album Electric Café

test

Odd. This and other PF audio figured in a dream last night. Then I came downstairs and saw this.