I am reasonably certain the instrument heard here is some kind of mandolin. I did not get a good look at the instrument, and the performer had no identifying information on display.

Most of the time when I post music as heard through payphones I just post it pretty much as it came across, with no editing save for amplifying or trimming silences. This time I processed it using some default noise filter settings and it turned out reasonably decent, considering the recording device.

For as much as sound means to me I am distressingly uneducated in the nuances of audio processing and even the basics of noise reduction. I mean I know how to capture noise prints and I have cleaned up certain sounds using the spectral analyzer and other such tools. But I guess those techniques don’t really come into play with this kind of audio, given its ruggedness and my desire to keep it that way.

This little pursuit of recording sounds through subway and street payphones had gotten a little long in the tooth, but my interest returned when I found that some of the payphones in Times Square and other stations actually work again, after a hiatus of a year or longer. Most intriguing of all is the payphone I used in an earlier post, which has a busted handset on account of which I, like any normal person, assumed did not work at all. It can bring in sound, since the bottom of the handset still works, but trying to do so has been miss-or-miss so far, as opposed to the usual hit-or-miss.