> 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...
The creative freedom without commercial intervention - this is very cool. I can almost hear it in The Wall - how grand and elongated the songs are.
What a great interview. Thank you for linking
Ironic that Have a Cigar was released four years before The Wall:
The band is just fantastic, that is really what I think
Oh, by the way, which one's Pink?It also gave Chris Fitzmorris (the neighbor) one of the greatest "random cool thing that happened to me" stories ever.
You can tell the operator was really loving that....
https://telephoneworld.org/telephone-sounds/miscellaneous-te...
I believe (unable to fully verify) she got a credit in the 2017 album “Is This The Life We Really Want? — Almost 40 years after the release of The Wall”.
https://www.discogs.com/release/10441646-Roger-Waters-Is-Thi...
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.
Dark Side of the Moon and the Wizard of Oz. It’s just two artists putting a story arc together by feel and getting the same shape. A bit birthday paradox, but a bit shared vibe.
In the case of The Wall, I would bet a certain degree of symmetry was being reached for. Few artists want to leave or start an album on a sour note, but there will be songs in the middle that are.
One of the things I miss from the pre-streaming era is that “nobody” listens to whole albums at a time anymore, and I find that a shame. I used to start humming the next song on the album when I would hear things on the radio. Makes it worse when they trim the intro or outro for radio play though. I prefer the album version of Wish You Were Here, for instance.
And she did appreciate what an experience it was - like watching a movie when all you've ever seen were Youtube Shorts, or like reading a novel when all you've ever read were memes.
I’ve been looking forward to finding out how Aphex Twin has built projects around the streaming format. It may take many more years and releases until someone finds out something like the ten seconds from 0:30-0:40 on all his tracks work when randomly played together in any order, or something along those line.
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...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.
[0] https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/jame...
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.
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.
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.
Also, having a show play in the background while I do something else like many people love to do? I can't do it.
Less than fifteen years an ago someone caught me listening to music while watching an old movie and typing on my computer at the same time. I was like, I can explain.
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.
Pink Floyd's 'The Wall': A Complete Analysis
Doesn't the internet still have some pretty places?
Seeing that in its original context was jarring
"If your grandmother or any other member of the family Should die whilst in the shelter Put them outside, but remember to tag them first For identification purposes"
44 is the country code for the UK.
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 between 1980 and now where part of 1831 was a London number.
Later on (in the addendum), it turns out that others took a look at the signal in the time domain and spotted a splice, i.e. digits are chopped out of the middle of the number, so the area code probably isn't there at all. It could be that the area code starts with 1, and then the phone number ends with 831.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28858285
It references a Telephone World article called ''Pink Floyd's Young Lust – explained and demystified'' with great analysis of the sequences heard.
I used to work with telephony until 2011. While I worked in Sweden, I am sure this applies for UK, too.
There is no standard in phone number lengths, you can have all sorts of prefixed series, so for example if the area code is "1", then the number 0 could be routed to a destination.
So 04410 is theoretically valid.
Back then we even had 3-digit short form numbers (like 911) that we had to specifically deal with each phone operator for keeping.
It was used for pricey phone dating.
What about when outer London numbers started 081? Dialed from another country with the 00 international call prefix the number if could be a fragment starting from the second digit (i.e. 0044 1831xxxx)?
the change form 01 was a big deal, and BT ran some very amusing ads playing on snobbishness about where in London one lived.
(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)
That one's just ordinary DTMF. I recorded the audio, trimmed it manually and then made a spectrogram like this:
sox gun1.wav -n rate 4k spectrogram -m -y 500
(And google finds quite a few pages confirming those digits)