Okay, okay. I wouldn’t be writing about this if it didn’t involve Pink Floyd but it does so here we are. Matthias over at The Corelatus Blog decided, at the request of a friend, to decode the phone system signaling tones that appear in one of the songs from Pink Floyd’s The Wall. He was handicapped because he was working from the movie instead of the actual song, Young Lust, from the album.
His explorations would make any nerd proud. He generated a spectrogram and compared it against the various phone system signaling protocols that existed at the time The Wall album and movie were produced (late 70’s early 80’s). Here in the U.S., those who know anything about the in-band signaling systems used at the time are familiar with AT&T’s but other countries had their own systems that used different tones. Matthias was unable to match the tones from the soundtrack to any of them.
Had he been a Pink Floyd fanatic fan like we here at Irreal, he would have known that the tones came from Young Lust and that, in fact, it was a recording of an actual call. Even the operator on the track is a real operator unaware that she was appearing in a rock song. Listen to the song to hear her puzzlement at the other side’s continued hanging up.
Matthias has an after note that mentions most of this. I like his post because
- It involves the greatest rock band of all time, and
- It demonstrates the typical nerd approach to solving a problem, no matter how trivial.
None of it matters at all, of course, but if you like Pink Floyd trivia and enjoy seeing a nerd approach and solve problems, take a look at his post