Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternatively, treating the “random telephone operator” as a prop and forcing them to be part of your project without consent is troubling.
Excessive empathy is not a virtue.
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Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'
121–130 of 141 posts
Re: Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was wondering if they ever figured out who the operator was? I couldn’t find anything about her through my Googling. Seems like she should have some credit in the album for her brilliant contribution
The session singer who did "The Great Gig in the Sky" vocals on The Dark Side of the Moon famously got £30. She later sued and got an undisclosed settlement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clare_Torry
Also on that album of course "There is no dark side of the moon, really. As a matter of fact, it's all dark". Wasn't that just some random studio guy, on the spur of the moment, too? Simpler times, more creativity.
Re: Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
The session singer who did "The Great Gig in the Sky" vocals on The Dark Side of the Moon famously got £30. She later sued and got an undisclosed settlement. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clare_Torry
Also on that album of course "There is no dark side of the moon, really. As a matter of fact, it's all dark". Wasn't that just some random studio guy, on the spur of the moment, too? Simpler times, more creativity.
Pink Floyd wrote some questions down on note cards and asked random people in the studio, recording their answer. The Beatles were part of this, but their answers were too guarded and weren't used.
Re: Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'
#124On 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.
It's a nice coincidence but I doubt it was intentional or even subconscious - The Wall was released in 1979, when casette tapes were only just starting to become popular (it was the same year as the first Walkman was released, which contributed hugely to their growth). The vast majority of record sales were vinyl and most bands would be concentrating on that format.
Re: Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternatively, treating the “random telephone operator” as a prop and forcing them to be part of your project without consent is troubling.
I do not believe that you are genuinely troubled by this.
I mean... I'm not troubled by it, but as a person who has worked in a job where I received direct calls from the public that I had no choice but to deal with it, I am definitely annoyed on behalf of the operator. It's not the worst thing in the world, but... wow, what an annoying day.
Can you imagine six months later, you hear your most annoying day at work played on an album?!
Re: Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not believe that you are genuinely troubled by this.
I mean... I'm not troubled by it, but as a person who has worked in a job where I received direct calls from the public that I had no choice but to deal with it, I am definitely annoyed on behalf of the operator. It's not the worst thing in the world, but... wow, what an annoying day. Can you imagine six months later, you hear your most annoying day at work played on an album?!
As a former telephone operator from this era who spent most shifts frantically bubbling scantrons as business men rattled off their calling card numbers and call numbers at lighting speed, I would have been delighted by this break in routine.
Re: Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'
#127> 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.
Re: Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'
#128Earlier 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.
Sharp made an auto-reversing turntable, it played both sides, front-loaded like a CD player. I have never seen one, despite being an old guy who is of that era. There were but a handful of turntables that could do this, so that’s a lot of production effort for a joke but a few were equipped to get.
There were a lot of eight tracks during that time, though, so sibling comment is more likely correct.
Re: Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean... I'm not troubled by it, but as a person who has worked in a job where I received direct calls from the public that I had no choice but to deal with it, I am definitely annoyed on behalf of the operator. It's not the worst thing in the world, but... wow, what an annoying day. Can you imagine six months later, you hear your most annoying day at work played on an album?!
As a former telephone operator from this era who spent most shifts frantically bubbling scantrons as business men rattled off their calling card numbers and call numbers at lighting speed, I would have been delighted by this break in routine.
> frantically bubbling scantrons
I want to know more!
I assumed numbers were entered directly on a 10-key. Were they scantrons as a paper record, as an asynchronous way to enter the data, or?
Re: Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's cool to hear how that came together as an improvisation. It recalls a simpler time when a major album (or movie, TV show, etc) could just feature your neighbor and a random telephone operator without signing releases and clearing rights. It also gave Chris Fitzmorris (the neighbor) one of the greatest "random cool thing that happened to me" stories ever.
Alternatively, treating the “random telephone operator” as a prop and forcing them to be part of your project without consent is troubling.
Agreed. Not monstrous, but troubling.
It is bizarre that people are smugly dogpiling on you for showing a shred of empathy.