Spying On Myself With LinkNYC

One of the weirdest incidents I had with LinkNYC occurred when I connected several machines to a conference call, but without blasting noise like I usually did. Walking up Third Avenue in midtown I simply dialed a phone number and moved on. I recorded a lot of calls like this, eventually trimming out the silence and funneling the sounds into LinkNYC Radio, one of my Shoutcast streams at WSBJ.com. In using the phones as curbside microphones I expected to hear stray words and shouts from passers-by. Indeed I did but I also heard full conversations, or in this case one side of a conversation:

I have no idea why the video looks like mud for the first few seconds.

The individual heard through this kiosk could have had no idea his words echoed through a dozen or more loudspeakers up and down Third Avenue. The clarity of his voice surprised me. Most sounds I ever heard going into LinkNYC’s phone calling app sounded like garbage coming out. He must have stood right next to the kiosk, maybe leaning against its advertising screen, unaware that a microphone next to him captured and relayed every word he said.

LinkNYC Radio has, thus far, not turned out as interesting as I might have expected. But that would not be so had I not lost a huge batch of recordings to some kind of Skype API glitch. Long story that.

A decidedly weird incident with collecting sounds for LinkNYC Radio came when I dialed in to a conference call and, after connecting, heard my ex-girlfriend’s sister call my name. She happened to pass by as I, to use her description, “played with the machine”. She knew of my interest in these things. This conversation, the first I had had with any of my ex’s family since the breakup, took place close enough to the kiosk that it could possibly have recorded it. Spying on myself, I thought, as the doleful yet cathartic conversation moved along.

But were we intelligibly recorded?

Not really. You could hear the timbres of our voices creep through the swirl of street noise but I don’t think a single intelligible word made it. We were not yelling, for one thing, which you pretty much have to do if you expect anyone you call to hear you through LinkNYC’s phone calls. We also would have had to stand much closer to the machine, as I suspect the man heard in the video above did.