I have not posted much here lately, but that does not mean I have not kept busy. I decided to fill in the Payphone Radio playlist once and for all with as many usable calls as possible from 2011 to 2020. Over 1600 calls, played back in the order received, now populate the Shoutcast stream at payphoneradio.com, with interstitial tracks that include audio of subway musicians and buskers as heard through nearby payphones, and sounds one hears when attempting to call a disconnected payphone. Altogether it’s about 63 hours of payphone calls and about 7 hours of the other stuff, though I intend to trim down the length of the interstitial content.

The past week has seen little more for me than editing audio and bulk renaming and editing of metadata for those 1600+ audio files. Tedious, but satisfying. I had forgotten so much of this audio landscape of my life, which varies in quality from unspeakably mundane to, in my opinion, pretty good stuff. A next task will be to trim down the playlist of the aforementioned mundanities, and determine what happened to calls from 2014 and 2015. At present I have only about a dozen, but am certain there were far more than that.

I had not considered it until now but, on average, I probably spent about $100 a year on these coin calls. That’s a lot less than I spent on cell phone fees for that stretch of time but I guess that’s an unfair comparison. Other costs associated with the project include fees for a dedicated Skype number, which I probably no longer need; magicJack, which I killed off a few years ago; web hosting for the stream, and other relatively modest expenses.

I purchased Pamela and made good use of it until the Skype API changed and the software was no longer usable. Aside from Tumblr, which used to have a phonecall-to-blog feature, I’ve not encountered another product besides Pamela that automatically posted incoming phone calls to a website. It proved to be more trouble than benefit in my case, as so many calls from payphones sound like garbage or else else simply need a little audio enhancement before they’d be worth making public.

At present I have a PBX setup which, if it proves reliable and I get up to speed on managing it, should replace most of those expenses for $5 a month. I did make a handful of calls to this project from a cell phone, and after the Covid-19 lockdown I tried to continue the radio using Skype. It just was not the same spirit. Payphone Radio is about place, about standing still, thinking about what you want to say and saying it as efficiently as possible, since you only have a limited amount of time before you either get cut off or have to shovel more money into the phone.

It also sought to create a sort of audio snapshot of the public telephone soundscape, which varies tremendously from one device to the next. Any pursuit that depends on a reliable public telephone network is in peril from the get-go, and the quantity of unusable and otherwise failed calls that never made it into the rotation proves it.

But as I rambled through these calls I really came to love the sound quality of the old copper landline phones. Most of New York’s payphones today (what’s left of them, and if they even work at all) connect to the Verizon wireless network. But now and again I find an old landline connection and the difference in sound quality compared to the wireless phones is like night and day. It’s just so much better.