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

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

#101

Post by emmelaich »

SoftTalker wrote: post #47
cassiepaper wrote: post #8

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 s…

"He keeps hanging up. And it's a man answering." You can tell the operator was really loving that....

Too cheap to hire a voice actor, let's stress out some random telephone operator.

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

#102

Post by yard2010 »

joey_spaztard wrote: post #22

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.

I wish there could be a way for me to live through these times. Like world of warcraft classic, but for real life. I know that we're like years away from stuff like these.

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

#103

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

hinkley wrote: post #74
criddell wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first words on Pink Floyd’s The Wall are “… we came in?”. The last words on the album are “Isn’t this where …”.

If memory serves, I believe record players that could flip the records were contemporary to the release of The Wall. My parents didn’t have a flipper but they had a player that could play a stack of records and The Wall was the first or second LP try bought to play on it. That definitely works on an auto reversing tape deck, which it looks like existed for fifteen years prior.

It is more likely a gimmick for the 8-track release.

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

#105

Post by jasomill »

plapsley wrote: post #67
matthiasl wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right; I think CCITT5 is just another name for SS5, because different groups were writing standards. Bell called it one thing, CCITT (an international standards group) called it another thing. And then in the 1990s, the CCITT renamed itself to ITU.

Yes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_System_No._5 SS5 was derived from AT&T's US MF signaling system, described in "Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching" by Breen and Dahlbom, Bell System Technical Journal, November 1960. PDF here: https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/breen1960.pdf The BSTJ article has a discussion on international signaling on pp. 1430-1441.

Fascinating article. See also

https://web.archive.org/web/20120314023131if_/http://www.alc...

for an early technical article describing the implementation details of the familiar DTMF "touch tone" dialing system, noting that the precise details differ from the final implementation — in particular, the high group frequencies increased from 1,094/1,209/1,336/1,477 Hz to 1,209/1,336/1,477/1,633 Hz, possibly to mitigate the "pulling" effect described on pp. 251–252 (though I can find no reference for the rationale).

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

#106

Post by velocity3230 »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #25
matthiasl wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Normally, films use deliberately fictious numbers, e.g. in the US it's always xxx555xxxxxx. Wikipedia says the UK uses various area codes for the same thing, including 011x and 01x1. The Pink Floyd number is a bit unusual---it's not made up. According to a previous analysis, the call was the album's "Chief Engineer James Guthrie who called his own London apartment", with a neighbour answering the phone.…

There are some hits in this old phonebook [1], but one needs to pay to view the records. Maybe some one else can do this. [1] https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/1025/?name=Jam...

[dead]

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

#107

Post by pbhjpbhj »

technothrasher wrote: post #68
fredoralive wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A London number at the time would be from the UK (01) eee nnnn where e is the exchange[1] and n is just a number, and the 01 can be omitted if you're in the 01 area. For intentional calls it would be (+44) 1 eee nnnn, as you omit the initial 0 that on an internal UK call is an indication you're dialling an STD[2] number and not a local number. There doesn't seem to have been an 831 exchange at the time[3], so as note…

> you'd ask the operator for something like "WHItehall 1212" I still remember my mom making me memorize our phone number when I was very young, "SPring 9 0273". It wasn't very long afterward that everybody switched to all number dialing though.

In the early 80s I knew two phone numbers - 999 for the police, 555 for home.

The exchange was in a tiny hamlet a few miles away.

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

#108

Post by GrumpyNl »

cassiepaper wrote: post #8

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 s…

This contradicts the finds of the author, this story means it was regular DTMF used while the author could not find that. Or am i missing something?

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

#109

Post by matthiasl »

GrumpyNl wrote: post #108
cassiepaper wrote: post #8

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 s…

This contradicts the finds of the author, this story means it was regular DTMF used while the author could not find that. Or am i missing something?

(Author here) No contradiction.

I think what happened is

1. The recording engineer dialled the operator. Could have been pulse dialling, could have been DTMF, doesn't matter.

2. Operator answered and the engineer said "I'd like to call London, collect, number 01xxx831".

3. Operator entered 044 1 xxx 831, and this was transmitted to another exchange in SS5 tones.

I didn't grow up in the USA, but a couple of people who did have said that, yes, they think that at least some of the time, you could hear the SS5 tones and also the initial conversation between the operator and whoever answered the phone. It may be that it depended on the operator, since they probably had a mute button, and maybe on the particular exchange the operator was in.

In the film, we hear from 3 onwards.

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