During the holiday season Christmas music is played through loudspeakers on Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens, and in other areas of the city. Here is how that music sounds when heard through a public pay telephone located near one of the loudspeakers. For my money “Silent Night” (track #1) has a particularly funereal, post-apocalyptic sound when heard through the rugged, muffled sound of a payphone.
The raw audio is copied from a Skype voicemail box. That audio picked up by the payphone is usually just barely audible. Needless to say a telephone handset is not meant to be used as a high fidelity recording instrument. Thus the raw audio has been amplified significantly but otherwise it is not processed through any audio software filter jujitsu.
The intrusion of a robot voice demanding 25¢ for the next three minutes is amusing. That message is, I believe, only supposed to be heard by the person using the payphone, not the person being called.
Why, you might be asking, would anyone record street music through payphones? I actually find the sound, at its random best, to be beautiful. The texture of the sound mixture is hauntingly artistic for the way it makes me struggle to hear the music among the noise, or to treat the noise as the music’s equal. It is the same type of excitement I used to feel listening to 78-RPM recordings, as the crackle of the LP record’s imperfections became a part of the music.
The music in these tracks attains a poignancy as it both drowns beneath and intertwines with the noises of car horns and buses roaring past. These are not the best quality recordings of this type that I’ve made but they turned out better than I expected.
All these recordings were made using this payphone in this picture, its handset left to dangle where it would best capture audio from the overhead loudspeaker. In times past I might have worried that someone might actually want to use the payphone while I was doing this, ending my call so they could make theirs. No worries about that any more. Most people don’t even notice that these payphone enclosures are here. This payphone’s number is (718) 721-1072:
The phone is owned by CityBridge, the consortium of companies that wants to place those horrible LinkNYC devices every 50 feet throughout the five boroughs. While the LinkNYC rollout progresses CityBridge is still responsible for maintaining a majority of the city’s outdoor payphones.
I got a little lucky with this project. The phone is situated about as close to one of the loudspeakers as it could be. I made five 9-minute calls on this phone, all on December 6th. To keep a call going 9 minutes one must deposit 75¢ in coins. The $3.75 I fed into it is probably the most money this phone has ingested in one day in a very long time.
Maybe that much coinage gave it indigestion: The next day it no longer worked, nor did any of the CityBridge owned phones across the street. A bank of four CityBridge payphones had only one phone with a dial tone. That phone was the type that took my quarters and connected the call, but the voicemail recording I thought I had made was completely silent. Crappy payphones like that are kind of the norm around here, which is why I say I got a little lucky being able to capture these tracks at all.
By the way, if anyone reading this knows what track #4 is I’d appreciate a clue. Contact me here.