9 ms·

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

417 points by matthiasl 2y ago

peutetre 2y ago
> 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.
- matthiasl 2y ago
  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 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.
  - robthebrew 2y ago
    I remember London area codes being 01 (or 0441 from USA) followed by 6 digits, so maybe 3 are missing. It would be interesting to see if that landline is still available, but with 1000 possibilities (01ABC831) maybe a google search might be the way to go.
    - matthiasl 2y ago
      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. Someone probably knows roughly where James Guthrie lived in 1979/1980 and what the area code there was. But I don't.
      - aardvark179 2y ago
        Okay. If the call was from within the UK then I think the 0441 code would have been Swansea, but that would have required 3 numbers being cut from the middle.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - Polizeiposaune 2y ago
        Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)#Fictional_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)#Fiction..., the officially reserved block under the NANP has shrunk to XXX-555-01XX, but outside of XXX-555-1212 (directory assistance), and toll-free 800-555-XXXX there is little use of the range.
      - abdullahkhalids 2y ago
        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=James_Guthrie&event=1980&f-Self-Residence-StreetAddress=London&name_x=_1&residence=_london-england-united+kingdom_5274 https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/1025/?name=Jam...
        velocity3230 2y ago
        [dead]
      - stordoff 2y ago
        > Wikipedia says the UK uses various area codes for the same thing, including 011x and 01x1. Ofcom has set aside blocks of numbers within many different area codes for dramatic use[1]. The note on Wikipedia about 011x and 01x1 is that the reserved numbers in those (real) area codes usually end with 496 0xxx (so, for instance, 0114 496 0000 to 0114 496 0999 are reserved numbers in the Sheffield/0114 area - other 0114 numbers may be allocated to real customers). [1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/phone-numbers/numbers-for-drama https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/phone-numbers/...
    - wdfx 2y ago
      This is correct. In the 90's I recall London area prefix changed from 01 to first 071 (central) and 081 (greater) and then 0171 and 0181. Later still, those codes became 0207 and 0208. I still notice old shop signs up with the old prefixes.
  - graemep 2y ago
    > I couldn't find a time between 1980 and now where part of 1831 was a London number. 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.
  - cf100clunk 2y ago
    Hiya, I see that you updated your blog in regards to this previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28858285 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.
    - matthiasl 2y ago
      The discussion is new to me. I started analysing the audio because someone sent me a link to the film (The Wall) on youtube and asked me about the signalling. Once I'd decoded the telephone number, I tried googling it, to see if someone else had already figured out what it was (a US local number? the number to a US operator? the number a US operator called to talk to a UK operator? the number a UK operator dialled to get a London number?), but nothing came up. There's quite a bit of good discussion about that in the comments here. A week or two later, I tried googling 'Pink Floyd Telephone Call', and found that the audio actually comes from the album, i.e. it's not just in the film, and a bit more information about how it was made, and put that in the addendum.
  - taylorius 2y ago
    All UK internal phone numbers start with a zero. However when you dial the UK from abroad, you omit the leading zero, so the UK version of the number in question would be 01831, which sounds a lot like an area code (though apparently is not one in current use)
  - fredoralive 2y ago
    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 https://rhaworth.net/phreak/tenp_01.php has a list, although it seems to be based on a 1968 publication.
    - technothrasher 2y ago
      > 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.
      - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
        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.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      Show me… subscriber trunk dialing. I must know everything.
    - hnlmorg 2y ago
      > and that ruined the Live and Kicking phone number jingle I thought I was the only one that had that number burned into my memory for all time! I’m glad, for my sake at least, to hear I’m not the only one.
  - zxvkhkxvdvbdxz 2y ago
    > It's not long enough to be a London telephone number, and, today, I think London numbers start with 020. 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.
    - Aloha 2y ago
      Except in the US, and a handful of other countries who do have fixed length numbering plans.
      - zxvkhkxvdvbdxz 2y ago
        Was it always like that? The record was released in 1982. I know in my part of the world we went from 2-digit local numbers to 3-4-5 digits, to 8 or 10 digits over a century. My point being this is simply routing implementation details. Even USA has 911 for example.
        matthiasl 2y ago
        I looked at a London telephone book from 1979, when I think the record was released. Most of the phone numbers were something like 01 361 1234, i.e. seven digits after the 01 area code. The _361_ part was bold, so I think that was an exchange number. A few numbers were something like "Placename 12345". Wikipedia explains why that was.
- Tempat 2y ago
  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.
  - plapsley 2y ago
    Yes! This is what I concluded when, a few years back, I did a similar analysis to what matthiasl posted. <shameless plug> If you're interested in this kind of thing, please check out my book, Exploding the Phone. https://explodingthephone.com https://explodingthephone.com </shameless plug>
codevark 2y ago
Odd. This and other PF audio figured in a dream last night. Then I came downstairs and saw this.
- prepend 2y ago
  Obviously we are all still in your dream. Please hold on asleep as long as you can as I treasure my existence and don’t want it to end.
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    As "you are just a figment of my imagination" is solipsism, "I am just a figment of your imagination" must be cosolipsism.
- tzot 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 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/james-guthrie-interview-pink-floyd-the.html https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/jame...
- mrandish 2y ago
  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.
  - wahnfrieden 2y ago
    Musicians still release samples without clearing them
    - mrandish 2y ago
      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.
deleted 2y ago
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parpfish 2y ago
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. Seeing that in its original context was jarring
- s0sa 2y ago
  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.
  - chiph 2y ago
    Now I wonder if Frankie Goes to Hollywood sampled the voice on "Two Tribes" from some 1950's British government film. "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"
    - noizejoy 2y ago
      Almost. Not sampled from the original, but recreated by the same voice actor: > Actor Patrick Allen, who narrated the associated public information films, recreated this narration … [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_and_Survive#Cultural_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_and_Survive#Cultural_i...
  - hinkley 2y ago
    “Stewardess, I speak Jive.” Will to me always be the weirdest later screen appearance. June Cleaver arguing in jive is hard to beat.
defaultcompany 2y ago
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.
- hinkley 2y ago
  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.
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    My then-15 year old daughter surprised me a few years ago. We had just pulled up to the house. Instead of opening the car door, she put on Led Zeppelin I and we sat in the car listening to the entire album together. I honestly think that was the first time in her life that she put on an entire album to listen to. 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.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      Most good albums have one song that was never released as a single, that’s just for the fans. So even beyond the “story” the album contaminates, they miss important chapters. Anyone who talks about Tears for Fears, a side conversation about The Working Hour will start. Throwing Copper had five or six singles released over almost three years, but Pillar of Davidson is still my favorite song from that album, and one of my favorites overall. I could listen to Kashmir or PoD in much the same mood. They just build and build. It would be similar to Patreon content today (though writers with Patreon or magazine articles often release collections later that have all of the rarer content. Martha Wells is the first to spring to my mind, and Naomi Novik for another)
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related: Pink Floyd's 'The Wall': A Complete Analysis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42402981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42402981
- cellular 2y ago
  Information society has dial tones too....
joey_spaztard 2y ago
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.
- matthiasl 2y ago
  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.
  - plapsley 2y ago
    Yes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_System_No._5 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 https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/breen1960.pdf The BSTJ article has a discussion on international signaling on pp. 1430-1441.
    - plapsley 2y ago
      CCITT (ITU-T) version can be downloaded for free (!) from their website. https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-Q.140-Q.180-198811-I/en https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-Q.140-Q.180-198811-I/en Specific download link in English is https://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T-REC-Q.140-Q.180-198811-I!!PDF-E&type=items https://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T-REC-Q.14...
    - jasomill 2y ago
      Fascinating article. See also https://web.archive.org/web/20120314023131if_/http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol39-1960/articles/bstj39-1-235.pdf 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).
qwertox 2y ago
> https://telephoneworld.org/landline-telephone-history/pink-floyds-young-lust-explained-and-demystified/ https://telephoneworld.org/landline-telephone-history/pink-f... Doesn't the internet still have some pretty places?
- cf100clunk 2y ago
  We did that one already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28858285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28858285
codazoda 2y ago
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.
- ahmedfromtunis 2y ago
  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.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    This has changed for me over time. I’ve been trying to learn a new framework and working on leetcode problems. I used to put on an old album and go into Flow state, but now it’s too much at once. I dunno if it’s age or just being out of practice. 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.
  - holo234 2y ago
    [dead]
jhoechtl 2y ago
And what us the number in Knocking on Heavens door, the Guns n'roses version?
- matthiasl 2y ago
  659 8890 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)
- buildsjets 2y ago
  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.
greenavocado 2y ago
Nice; Now do an analysis of The Telephone Call by Kraftwerk on the album Electric Café
DidYaWipe 2y ago
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.
weinzierl 2y ago
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.
- Nition 2y ago
  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). [0] https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/james-guthrie-interview-pink-floyd-the.html https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/jame...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
velocity3230 2y ago
[dead]
486sx33 2y ago
Is there an AI trained on touch tone and other telephony signals? It would be kind of fun to decode historical tones in music and film more easily
- zaxomi 2y ago
  There are few well-documented standards. There are ready-made solutions that have worked for decades. What do you think AI would add?
  - phoronixrly 2y ago
    Yeah can we stuff an LLM in this distinctly no ML-required task...
willvk 2y ago
Not sure if it's been mentioned but 1831 on a keypad makes a triangle, or a prism, if you will.
retrac 2y ago
> 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.
rambler17 2y ago
test
rambler17 2y ago
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.
PaulHoule 2y ago
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)

417 points by matthiasl 2y ago

> 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.

matthiasl 2y ago
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 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.
- robthebrew 2y ago
  I remember London area codes being 01 (or 0441 from USA) followed by 6 digits, so maybe 3 are missing. It would be interesting to see if that landline is still available, but with 1000 possibilities (01ABC831) maybe a google search might be the way to go.
  - matthiasl 2y ago
    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. Someone probably knows roughly where James Guthrie lived in 1979/1980 and what the area code there was. But I don't.
    - aardvark179 2y ago
      Okay. If the call was from within the UK then I think the 0441 code would have been Swansea, but that would have required 3 numbers being cut from the middle.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Polizeiposaune 2y ago
      Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)#Fictional_usage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/555_(telephone_number)#Fiction..., the officially reserved block under the NANP has shrunk to XXX-555-01XX, but outside of XXX-555-1212 (directory assistance), and toll-free 800-555-XXXX there is little use of the range.
    - abdullahkhalids 2y ago
      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=James_Guthrie&event=1980&f-Self-Residence-StreetAddress=London&name_x=_1&residence=_london-england-united+kingdom_5274 https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/1025/?name=Jam...
      - velocity3230 2y ago
        [dead]
    - stordoff 2y ago
      > Wikipedia says the UK uses various area codes for the same thing, including 011x and 01x1. Ofcom has set aside blocks of numbers within many different area codes for dramatic use[1]. The note on Wikipedia about 011x and 01x1 is that the reserved numbers in those (real) area codes usually end with 496 0xxx (so, for instance, 0114 496 0000 to 0114 496 0999 are reserved numbers in the Sheffield/0114 area - other 0114 numbers may be allocated to real customers). [1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/phone-numbers/numbers-for-drama https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/phone-numbers/...
  - wdfx 2y ago
    This is correct. In the 90's I recall London area prefix changed from 01 to first 071 (central) and 081 (greater) and then 0171 and 0181. Later still, those codes became 0207 and 0208. I still notice old shop signs up with the old prefixes.
- graemep 2y ago
  > I couldn't find a time between 1980 and now where part of 1831 was a London number. 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.
- cf100clunk 2y ago
  Hiya, I see that you updated your blog in regards to this previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28858285 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.
  - matthiasl 2y ago
    The discussion is new to me. I started analysing the audio because someone sent me a link to the film (The Wall) on youtube and asked me about the signalling. Once I'd decoded the telephone number, I tried googling it, to see if someone else had already figured out what it was (a US local number? the number to a US operator? the number a US operator called to talk to a UK operator? the number a UK operator dialled to get a London number?), but nothing came up. There's quite a bit of good discussion about that in the comments here. A week or two later, I tried googling 'Pink Floyd Telephone Call', and found that the audio actually comes from the album, i.e. it's not just in the film, and a bit more information about how it was made, and put that in the addendum.
- taylorius 2y ago
  All UK internal phone numbers start with a zero. However when you dial the UK from abroad, you omit the leading zero, so the UK version of the number in question would be 01831, which sounds a lot like an area code (though apparently is not one in current use)
- fredoralive 2y ago
  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 https://rhaworth.net/phreak/tenp_01.php has a list, although it seems to be based on a 1968 publication.
  - technothrasher 2y ago
    > 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.
    - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
      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.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    Show me… subscriber trunk dialing. I must know everything.
  - hnlmorg 2y ago
    > and that ruined the Live and Kicking phone number jingle I thought I was the only one that had that number burned into my memory for all time! I’m glad, for my sake at least, to hear I’m not the only one.
- zxvkhkxvdvbdxz 2y ago
  > It's not long enough to be a London telephone number, and, today, I think London numbers start with 020. 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.
  - Aloha 2y ago
    Except in the US, and a handful of other countries who do have fixed length numbering plans.
    - zxvkhkxvdvbdxz 2y ago
      Was it always like that? The record was released in 1982. I know in my part of the world we went from 2-digit local numbers to 3-4-5 digits, to 8 or 10 digits over a century. My point being this is simply routing implementation details. Even USA has 911 for example.
      - matthiasl 2y ago
        I looked at a London telephone book from 1979, when I think the record was released. Most of the phone numbers were something like 01 361 1234, i.e. seven digits after the 01 area code. The _361_ part was bold, so I think that was an exchange number. A few numbers were something like "Placename 12345". Wikipedia explains why that was.
Tempat 2y ago
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.
- plapsley 2y ago
  Yes! This is what I concluded when, a few years back, I did a similar analysis to what matthiasl posted. <shameless plug> If you're interested in this kind of thing, please check out my book, Exploding the Phone. https://explodingthephone.com https://explodingthephone.com </shameless plug>

codevark 2y ago

Odd. This and other PF audio figured in a dream last night. Then I came downstairs and saw this.

prepend 2y ago
Obviously we are all still in your dream. Please hold on asleep as long as you can as I treasure my existence and don’t want it to end.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  As "you are just a figment of my imagination" is solipsism, "I am just a figment of your imagination" must be cosolipsism.
tzot 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 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/james-guthrie-interview-pink-floyd-the.html https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/jame...

mrandish 2y ago
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.
- wahnfrieden 2y ago
  Musicians still release samples without clearing them
  - mrandish 2y ago
    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.

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parpfish 2y ago

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. Seeing that in its original context was jarring

s0sa 2y ago
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.
- chiph 2y ago
  Now I wonder if Frankie Goes to Hollywood sampled the voice on "Two Tribes" from some 1950's British government film. "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"
  - noizejoy 2y ago
    Almost. Not sampled from the original, but recreated by the same voice actor: > Actor Patrick Allen, who narrated the associated public information films, recreated this narration … [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_and_Survive#Cultural_impact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_and_Survive#Cultural_i...
- hinkley 2y ago
  “Stewardess, I speak Jive.” Will to me always be the weirdest later screen appearance. June Cleaver arguing in jive is hard to beat.

defaultcompany 2y ago

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.

hinkley 2y ago
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.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  My then-15 year old daughter surprised me a few years ago. We had just pulled up to the house. Instead of opening the car door, she put on Led Zeppelin I and we sat in the car listening to the entire album together. I honestly think that was the first time in her life that she put on an entire album to listen to. 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.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    Most good albums have one song that was never released as a single, that’s just for the fans. So even beyond the “story” the album contaminates, they miss important chapters. Anyone who talks about Tears for Fears, a side conversation about The Working Hour will start. Throwing Copper had five or six singles released over almost three years, but Pillar of Davidson is still my favorite song from that album, and one of my favorites overall. I could listen to Kashmir or PoD in much the same mood. They just build and build. It would be similar to Patreon content today (though writers with Patreon or magazine articles often release collections later that have all of the rarer content. Martha Wells is the first to spring to my mind, and Naomi Novik for another)

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related: Pink Floyd's 'The Wall': A Complete Analysis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42402981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42402981

cellular 2y ago
Information society has dial tones too....

joey_spaztard 2y ago

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.

matthiasl 2y ago
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.
- plapsley 2y ago
  Yes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signaling_System_No._5 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 https://explodingthephone.com/hoppdocs/breen1960.pdf The BSTJ article has a discussion on international signaling on pp. 1430-1441.
  - plapsley 2y ago
    CCITT (ITU-T) version can be downloaded for free (!) from their website. https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-Q.140-Q.180-198811-I/en https://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-Q.140-Q.180-198811-I/en Specific download link in English is https://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T-REC-Q.140-Q.180-198811-I!!PDF-E&type=items https://www.itu.int/rec/dologin_pub.asp?lang=e&id=T-REC-Q.14...
  - jasomill 2y ago
    Fascinating article. See also https://web.archive.org/web/20120314023131if_/http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/bstj/vol39-1960/articles/bstj39-1-235.pdf 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).

qwertox 2y ago

> https://telephoneworld.org/landline-telephone-history/pink-floyds-young-lust-explained-and-demystified/ https://telephoneworld.org/landline-telephone-history/pink-f... Doesn't the internet still have some pretty places?

cf100clunk 2y ago
We did that one already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28858285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28858285

codazoda 2y ago

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.

ahmedfromtunis 2y ago
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.
- hinkley 2y ago
  This has changed for me over time. I’ve been trying to learn a new framework and working on leetcode problems. I used to put on an old album and go into Flow state, but now it’s too much at once. I dunno if it’s age or just being out of practice. 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.
- holo234 2y ago
  [dead]

jhoechtl 2y ago

And what us the number in Knocking on Heavens door, the Guns n'roses version?

matthiasl 2y ago
659 8890 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)
buildsjets 2y ago
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.

greenavocado 2y ago

Nice; Now do an analysis of The Telephone Call by Kraftwerk on the album Electric Café

DidYaWipe 2y ago

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.

weinzierl 2y ago

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.

Nition 2y ago
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). [0] https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/james-guthrie-interview-pink-floyd-the.html https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/jame...

deleted 2y ago

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velocity3230 2y ago

[dead]

486sx33 2y ago

Is there an AI trained on touch tone and other telephony signals? It would be kind of fun to decode historical tones in music and film more easily

zaxomi 2y ago
There are few well-documented standards. There are ready-made solutions that have worked for decades. What do you think AI would add?
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  Yeah can we stuff an LLM in this distinctly no ML-required task...

willvk 2y ago

Not sure if it's been mentioned but 1831 on a keypad makes a triangle, or a prism, if you will.

retrac 2y ago

> 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.

rambler17 2y ago

test

rambler17 2y ago

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.

PaulHoule 2y ago

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)