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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'

#61

Post by fredoralive »

matthiasl wrote: post #3
peutetre wrote: post #2

> 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.

Author here. Yep, 44 is the UK country code. The problem I got stuck on is that the rest of the number, 1831, didn't make sense. I assumed the number was complete, since it had the right start and stop signalling (KP1/KF). It's not long enough to be a London telephone number, and, today, I think London numbers start with 020. The UK numbering plan has changed several times since 1980, but I couldn't find a time betwe…

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 noted in the article the cut to shorten the number is presumably somewhere in the middle.

In 1990 London was split into 071 (central) and 081 (areas), which meant in 1995 all landlines could have an 01 prefix, so London because 0171 and 0181 (and that ruined the Live and Kicking phone number jingle, although I think the Going Live one was better anyway) and finally in 2000 London became 020, with the 7/8 moving to the first digit of the local number (not that the split between local and area codes really matters anymore).

[1] Of course, in ye olden days before all this newfangled "dialling" you'd ask the operator for something like "WHItehall 1212", not 944 1212 (or later 930 1212).

[2] Subscriber Trunk Dialling.

[3] https://rhaworth.net/phreak/tenp_01.php has a list, although it seems to be based on a 1968 publication.

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

#62

Post by hinkley »

khazhoux wrote: post #56
hinkley wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes exactly the same amount of time to say as “Pink”

I'm going to listen to The Stones, then some Skynyrd, maybe put on some Zeppelin or the Dead.

But not The Zeppelin or The Skynyrd.

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

#63

Post by mrandish »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #27
mrandish wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

Musicians still release samples without clearing them

Yes, I'm aware. Although a major mega band doing so on a wide release album these days would be taking a significant legal risk - which is why it's now fairly rare. But back in 1979 it wasn't uncommon, to the extent that one of the then-biggest bands in the world could do so on their biggest album project yet.

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

#64

Post by hinkley »

WolfCop wrote: post #57
hinkley wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But never The Floyd. Just as the band isn’t named after a man called Pink.

It was named after a man called Pink. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Anderson

Okay. Not named after a band member named Pink.

Unlike Pink, which is the stage name of the artist.

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

#66

Post by plapsley »

Tempat wrote: post #29
peutetre wrote: post #2

> 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.

See the note at the end of the article. It’s a real number but with some of the digits in the middle edited out of the recording.

Yes! This is what I concluded when, a few years back, I did a similar analysis to what matthiasl posted. If you're interested in this kind of thing, please check out my book, Exploding the Phone. https://explodingthephone.com

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

#67

Post by plapsley »

matthiasl wrote: post #42
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.

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.

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

#68

Post by technothrasher »

fredoralive wrote: post #61
matthiasl wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Yep, 44 is the UK country code. The problem I got stuck on is that the rest of the number, 1831, didn't make sense. I assumed the number was complete, since it had the right start and stop signalling (KP1/KF). It's not long enough to be a London telephone number, and, today, I think London numbers start with 020. The UK numbering plan has changed several times since 1980, but I couldn't find a time betwe…

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.

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

#69

Post by ddingus »

hinkley wrote: post #62
khazhoux wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to listen to The Stones, then some Skynyrd, maybe put on some Zeppelin or the Dead.

But not The Zeppelin or The Skynyrd.

Same, except I do love "Sweet Home Alabama" so it will slip through.

I am currently burned out on Zep.

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

#70

Post by criddell »

dvh wrote: post #55
defaultcompany wrote: post #15

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.

Alphaville's second album Afternoons in Utopia starts with quiet muffled word "night", then followed by few seconds of silence and then first song called IAO starts. The last song on that album is about Lady Bright: There was a young lady named Bright Who's speed was much faster, much faster than light She departed one day In a relative way And returned on the previous...

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