live sound collage broadcasts



…with tonight’s special guest: the dial tone!

The rise of cellular telephony has created a library of sounds which, once familiar, are now rarely heard.  Tonight’s collage   features the mechanical sounds of the equipment that comprised the bell system phone network (trunks, exchanges, switches, panels, stacks, and crossbars), the sounds of that equipment being activated through rotary and dtmf signaling, regional code messages, busy signals, operators, and more…

Telephone sounds from the archives of:

The AT&T Archive
Telephone Historical Centre
The North American Data Communications Museum
The Herbert H. Warrick Jr. Museum of Communications
Georgia Rural Telephone Museum
Smithsonian Science Service
Bell South Telephone Museum
Telephone World

listen


Broadcast date: May 18th 2015
KCHUNG Los Angeles 1630AM



SPECIAL COLLECTIONS is a broadcast project by Sam Rowell.
Each edition is mixed live on the air.