During the late 1970s and early 1980s, not only was I recording amateur radio operators, I was listening to and recording more radio noises in general. One of the more interesting sounds was radio pagers. Back then, there was no texting or smart phones so when people needed to get in touch quickly, individuals would actually call on the phone to a paging service. I thought that live operators, quite often women, would speak into microphones and deliver messages just like police and fire dispatchers over VHF radio or the individual wanting to place a page would speak into their phone. I honestly don’t know which way it was done, but the professional quality of the female voices suggested to me that they were operators rather than individuals placing voice pages. Before the actual page was spoken, special tones were sent out which would activate the correct pager. I would guess if this was how paging was done, then the person calling the paging service may have pressed touch tone buttons to activate the correct pager receiver. Then it was up to the individuals with the pagers to respond. I f anyone has a thought about this, please comment. Also I had recently been noticing the film “THX-1138” and because of its soundtrack, it rapidly became one of my favorite movies. I noticed a lot of the sounds I was recording were similar to the sounds in the film. I imagined if the paging offices were actually like the environment in “THX-1138.” Then I wondered, “What actually do the letters and numbers t-h-x-1-1-3-8 mean? It must be a phone number, Star Wars director George Lucas’ phone number.” Phone prefix THX or 849 I thought were in Oakland or Berkeley, and probably not belonging to George Lucas. As you can hear, I finally called the number and it turned out to be disconnected. Over the years I made several “communications” ambient mixes. Bits and pieces of these have been on “Over the Edge” radio programs. Another version mixed by “Everyman” can be heard by searching “The Weatherman and Everyman – Analog Paging.” This search brings up several “questionable” mp3 download sites. Be careful! I was able to download the audio from at least one of these sites, however.
The version I’m presenting in this post was made by setting up five media players playing wav files off the hard drive, and internet radio steaming live. If you would like to see exactly what the media players were doing, go to the large picture and if you can blow up or magnify the image you will be able to see everything including my computers CPU usage. CPU usage is important to monitor when using multiple media players because as more players are turned on, the higher the CPU usage. When you get closer to 100 per cent the more likely the computer will crash, which should be avoided. It did happen, possibly on this computer, once when I had twelve media players running simultaneously. It didn’t damage anything, and the computer simply turned off the media players and then restarted. I wouldn’t recommend doing this, mainly because I’m not sure if it actually is hurting the computer.
There are a couple of interesting web sites that relate to the sounds that I recorded in this post. The first one relating to “very low frequency radio” or VLF is about electromagnetic energy in the Earth’s atmosphere and the sounds it produces. The other site, “Phone Trips” goes into great detail about how telephone networks operated, mainly from the 1960s and 70s. In addition there are many sound files that remind me even more of THX-1138 and vintage communication noises in general. Just a few other things I forgot to mention. My favorite voice page starting at about -2:12 is “Jim Call Your Exchange… Holding A Massage For You.” Also the Vallejo mobile or marine operator (-3:30 and-3:11) for car phones or ship-to-shore phone calls is heard saying “Vallejo… Vallejo Off.” Keep in mind, there were no cell phones at this time and it was quite a big deal to have a phone in a vehicle. The phone call was originally recorded onto cassette tape with the red and green phone wires connected to the line input of a cassette recorder, possibly my Norelco 1530. There was a capacitor in series with the input to prevent DC phone voltage from getting into the recorder. I think the phone line (Martinez, Ca. prefix 228) may have still had a party line with a neighbor. All radio noises were received on my inexpensive Radio Shack Patrolman 4 multi-band radio at my home in Martinez, California, between 152 megahertz and 153 megahertz. The poor selectivity of this radio (wide band FM only) made these sounds more like the sounds in THX – 1138.
You probably will not know what to think after listening to this recording. This was made in the early 1970s, probably 1971, while I was in the 11th grade at Alhambra High School in Martinez, California. I was friendly with a fellow student who had a distinctive voice and an interest in recording. My parents had just purchased a Sony TC – 560D open reel tape recorder, the same machine that I used to record “Harry To The Ferry.” So one day I had my friend over to the house, and it didn’t take long to decide what to record. As soon as he spotted a copy of The Contra Costa Times newspaper on the coffee table, he knew just what to do or maybe not. But nevertheless he started turning pages and reading parts of sentences and then recombining them in all sorts of nonsensical ways. Some of you might recognize some of the names including Gary Bogue, the pet and animal columnist , Royal Pools, and of course Walnut Creek Inn. The idea of Hong Kong being at Walnut Creek Inn seemed very funny to me. Now I think that idea would be quite reasonable, such as an Asian restaurant being inside or somehow associated with a large hotel.
I recorded my friends voice using my Calrad DM-59HL dynamic microphone, plugged directly into one channel of the microphone input on the Sony tape deck at 3 3/4 inches per second. Years later I thought it might be fun if I had the sound of an angry parakeet to go along with the voice. I already had recordings of my pet parakeet “Greenboy” and so I think (I can’t quite remember) I played a cassette tape connected to the other unused channel on the Sony. On the TC – 560D there is a record button for each channel so you can record one mono track on the left or right, and then rewind the tape and record the other side while listening to the first recording, and since there are only two heads on this recorder, syncing the recordings was never a problem. I think while I was still living in California, I digitized the voice recording to a 256 KBPS MP3. I know now that digital recording should have been made into a lossless file like .aif or .wav, but it still sounded okay, anyway. In preparing the recording for this post, I used Adobe Audition to process the stereo version (with parakeet squawking or scolding as I like to call it) with room ambience. In the monaural version I used several types of compression to try to make the voice consistently as loud and clear as possible without clipping distortion. Also on this version, you might notice the fade up and the fade out have filters that open the high frequencies at the beginning and close back down at the ending.
I know all of that was a mouthful or whatever, but I hope you can enjoy and have a laugh!
This will be the final post of a recording I made on Mother’s Day 1985. It’s all of side 2 of a C-90 cassette tape with the material from the posts “Mother’s Day 1985 # 1” and “Mother’s Day 1985 # 2” as well as all of the other parts on side 2. There’s over 45 minutes of sound with my mother, father, grandmother, and myself. In addition you can hear all of the first part of this recording by going to the post entitled “Mother’s Day 1985 # 3.” It’s actually side 1 of the same C-90 cassette tape. This part is only a little more than 15 minutes in length, due to the fact I started recording after the first 30 minutes of tape. I actually didn’t realize the tape had another recording on it already, and it was too late to buy more cassette tape. I didn’t want to record over the other part, and I may post it another time. But for now I’m not going to tell you what it is……it’s just too dumb!
I want to point out that I think I already posted this around Mother’s Day of 2010 as “Mother’s Day 1985 All side 2” and somehow it was accidentally deleted. I sincerely apologize for that error!
