> 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.
> Initially, I was shocked at how slowly everything moved! I was used to working really quickly when producing and engineering albums. Suddenly it was like the brakes were on and often it was difficult to get the momentum going. Eventually, I adapted to the Floyd pace. One of the great things about working with this band is that you are allowed time to be creative, to pursue an idea even if it takes some time. The Floyd had a production deal to make their records and the record label never heard anything until it was done. The record was made purely and only by the people in the studio.
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.
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.
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
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.
I’m betting subconscious but intentional. I’ve heard a couple artists talk about how they organize an album and there’s a vibe they’re going for but I didn’t get the impression any of them had it down to anything like a science.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Cassiepaper posted an interview[0] elsewhere in this discussion that says it was James Guthrie's flat in London (James Guthrie being their producer and engineer).
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.
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.
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.
I have the same issue. When I turn music on, I can't stop focusing on it and losing track of whatever intellectual task I'm on. The only thing I can listen to while writing/reading is white noise or nature sounds type of thing.
Also, having a show play in the background while I do something else like many people love to do? I can't do it.
> 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.
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.
I know what you mean. I recently did the same thing for the little bit from Gunsmoke at the beginning of “Is There Anybody Out There?”, e.g. “Is it unsafe to travel at night?” - incidentally spoken by actress Diana Muldaur, who later played Dr. Pulaski in Star Trek TNG.
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.
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.
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
The 'rate' switch is to cut down on how much of the frequency space we can see. I left the audio as stereo because there's less music power on one channel, making it easier to see the tones.
(And google finds quite a few pages confirming those digits)
659-8890. You just better start sniffin' your own rank subjugation Jack, 'cause it's just you against your tattered libido, the bank, and the mortician, forever man, and it wouldn't be luck if you could get out of life alive.
In a parallel universe, this thread is about the Beatles, where you woke up from the dream, found your way downstairs, had a coffee and somebody replied to your post.
cassiepaper|1 year ago
> 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...
raywu|1 year ago
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
mrandish|1 year ago
It also gave Chris Fitzmorris (the neighbor) one of the greatest "random cool thing that happened to me" stories ever.
SoftTalker|1 year ago
You can tell the operator was really loving that....
jameslk|1 year ago
GrumpyNl|1 year ago
defaultcompany|1 year ago
hinkley|1 year ago
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.
dvh|1 year ago
frereubu|1 year ago
weinzierl|1 year ago
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.
Nition|1 year ago
[0] https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/jame...
joey_spaztard|1 year ago
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.
matthiasl|1 year ago
yard2010|1 year ago
codazoda|1 year ago
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.
ahmedfromtunis|1 year ago
Also, having a show play in the background while I do something else like many people love to do? I can't do it.
retrac|1 year ago
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.
ChrisArchitect|1 year ago
Pink Floyd's 'The Wall': A Complete Analysis
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42402981
cellular|1 year ago
qwertox|1 year ago
Doesn't the internet still have some pretty places?
cf100clunk|1 year ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28858285
parpfish|1 year ago
Seeing that in its original context was jarring
s0sa|1 year ago
peutetre|1 year ago
44 is the country code for the UK.
matthiasl|1 year ago
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.
Tempat|1 year ago
DidYaWipe|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
PaulHoule|1 year ago
(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)
rambler17|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
willvk|1 year ago
jhoechtl|1 year ago
matthiasl|1 year ago
That one's just ordinary DTMF. I recorded the audio, trimmed it manually and then made a spectrogram like this:
The 'rate' switch is to cut down on how much of the frequency space we can see. I left the audio as stereo because there's less music power on one channel, making it easier to see the tones.(And google finds quite a few pages confirming those digits)
buildsjets|1 year ago
486sx33|1 year ago
zaxomi|1 year ago
greenavocado|1 year ago
rambler17|1 year ago
velocity3230|1 year ago
[deleted]
codevark|1 year ago
tzot|1 year ago
prepend|1 year ago