Faking It: The Obviously Dubbed Telephone Ring

This is one of countless examples of the Western Electric Model 500

telephone

. Originally introduced in 1950, this

telephone

in its many colors and variants was used in virtually every home and business in the United States well into the 1980s and beyond. You see, until the sale of the Bell system in 1984, no one owned their phones. They were owned by the telephone company and were leased to the customer. Western Electric was a wholly owned subsidiary of the American Telephone & Telegraph company, and AT&T enjoyed a monopoly as THE telephone company throughout the United States for much of the 20th century.

So this phone belonged in every sense to the phone company. The Model 500 telephone, along with the Model 554 wall telephone, is an iconic design from the signature of Henry Dreyfuss, a prolific designer whose focus on ergonomics marked much of the mid-20th century. One of his most recognizable features is his

ring

. If his smartphone has an old phone option, it could very well be a recording from one of these phones. When tone service was first introduced in 1963, the Model 500 was transformed into the Model 1500, replacing the rotary dial with a series of buttons. In 1968, the Model 1500 was further refined into the Model 2500, which added the star key and the hash... ...excuse me, hash key.

You see, kids, before the advent of the touch-tone dialing system, telephones used a rotary dial. By repeatedly breaking the telephone's connection to the telephone line, through a process called pulse dialing, mechanically driven switching equipment would create an actual circuit between one telephone and another possibly hundreds of miles away. To use this dial, insert your finger into the hole corresponding to the desired number and drag the dial to the stop of your finger. When your finger is removed from the dial, it returns to its original position, creating a corresponding number of pulses as it travels. Smaller numbers were faster to dial, which largely explains why large US cities have area codes consisting of small numbers, with New York being 212, Chicago being 312, and Los Angeles being 213.

Poor Honolulu arrived late to the party and received the terrible call. 808 long winded. Anyway, the 1500 and 2500 models featured a modified faceplate to accommodate the buttons, but almost everything else remained the same. Igno

ring

this model's added modular connection between the handset and wall cable, everything from the rear base is exactly the same. Take a look at the bottom and you'll see it's almost identical. And of course, the timbre remained virtually unchanged. These phones were designed to be in service for decades and, as such, are among the most robust objects in the home. Each and every one had to resist at least one of these; "Oh yeah?

Have a nice day!" Sometimes they would even have to support one of these. That pretty much sums up why they were in service for so long: they were sturdy, they worked, and they were easy to repair. Their modular construction meant that each component was easy to replace and, since there were millions Of the same telephone in service, each telephone technician would be intimately familiar with what could go wrong and how to fix it. However, the telephone was so reliable that they did not need repairing frequently. Sitting in the back are a pair of bells. These are what form the distinctive ringing, with the pitch interval between them a delightful major third.

There is a striker sitting right next to one bell and a good distance away from the other. When you receive a telephone call, the electricity of approximately 20 hz and 90 volts driving the chime will energize this solenoid and will repeatedly push the striker towards this bell and push it towards the other. The furthest bell can be moved with the help of a thumbwheel at the bottom, and this adjusts the volume of the chime. A closer distance between the bells restricts the movement of the firing pin, which softens the sound. Even when switching to the touch-tone keypad, the interior construction of the phone was largely the same.

Take a look at the ringer and it has the same rings and timbre, although there is a slight variation in tone between each phone. This example ditched all-metal construction for some cheaper plastic components, and the bracket on which the bells rest was broken and in need of repair. However, you can see that much of the design of these phones is the same, except for the keyboard/dialer and network electronics. Being a fixture of American life for so long means that these phones have appeared in countless movies and television shows. [BIALYSTOCK: Go to the desktop. Answer the phone.

Bialystock and Bloom? Bialystock and Bloom?’] [MAN HOLDING PHONE: Mr. Chambers? Kevin Harkins] [KITTY (sarcastically): I need to work on my attitude. Goodbye, then!] Since telephones were so ubiquitous, any television show or movie made between 1950 and 1984 and beyond in which a character answers a phone call will cause one of these phones to ring. [JACK: The backup team has to set up the guest list and (phone rings) the hotel room. Swigert. Yeah] [MIKE: Yeah, uh, is that Marge?] [JANINE (quietly): I have way better jobs than this. Ghostbusters, What Do You Want?] They were in service long after 1984; In fact, this model 500 is marked 1988 and was originally owned by Saskatchewan Tel.

Apparently it took a while for Saskatchewan to get into touch tone dialing. However, it is quite possible that this phone is much older, has been sold to Sasktel and has been refurbished, with the manufacturer being ITT and not Western Electric. Anyway, even in the nineties, these phones were common at home and also in movies. Now, before you call and complain that "there was also the Princess phone and the Trimline phone!" I recognize the existence of all these variants and others. However, the Model 500 in its original desk phone configuration was by far the most common phone, and so we'll ignore specialty phones for now.

Anyway, let's get back to the ring. If you're producing a TV show or movie and need a phone to ring, there are several ways to do it. One of them is to connect the phone to a ring circuit, which can make the phone ring with the press of a button. This has the advantage of creating a very realistic sounding ring, as the acoustics of the set will affect the ring just like everything else. It can also make it easier for actors to synchronize as they can react to the phone ringing. Or, you could go a step further and make the phone work by connecting it to an actual phone line.

Then you could really call it. This has the added benefit of making the one-sided phone call much more believable, as the actor could be speaking to someone on the other end of the line. However, this could be impractical for the set and adds expense to the production. Your third option is to cheat. Since you could hear this phone ringing in any home, office, or business, and all the phones sounded more or less the same, you could simply add a stock recording in the post. Doing this allowed the actors to simply answer the phone on their own time and also eliminated potential problems arising from poor microphone placement or high levels of background noise.

But sometimes you can tell when this has been done. And surprisingly, there appear to be some very old recordings that were used well into the digital sound era. In the days of analog recording technology, two important things to avoid were what is called wow and flutter. For example, a recording made on tape requires the tape to move at exactly the same speed without any variation; Otherwise, the pitch of what is being recorded may vary along with the speed of the tape. Many times this can go unnoticed, but when the recording is one tone, it can be quite pronounced.

This 2000hz sine wave should sound like this. But if recorded on tape with a recorder that has a worn capstan or any other problem, the tone might sound like that again. That's flutter and it can be quite annoying. Since the ring of these phones produces a constant tone, it is easy to distinguish a recording from a real ring. If you hear any tremor in the sound of this phone, you know you must be listening to an analog tape recording. Of course, movies and TV shows used recorders for many years, so some judder was to be expected in older movies.

But sometimes you hear a very slow, distinctive wow, which by the way is technically just a very slow flutter. Listen to this telephone ringtone from the movie Trading Places. [COLEMAN: Hello? Hmm. Oh. Hello Mr. Duke, sir.] Did you hear the pitch drop as it played? Listen again. [COLEMAN: Hello? Hmm. Oh.] The tone goes up and down when the phone rings. This variation in pitch continues as the vibration of the bells decays. This wouldn't happen with the recording equipment used on set, because a tape recorder would rarely introduce a wow as pronounced as this. The origin of this surprise is almost certainly a vinyl record.

I put the phone ringing sound into Audacity so I could place some markers where the ringing fails. This first marker is where the tone peaked and the second is at its lowest point. I placed a third marker on the next peak. The peak-to-peak time was 1.784 seconds. Why is that significant? Because a disk with a speed of 33 and a third RPM will make one revolution every 1.8 seconds. This is the new sound effects library of CBS audio files. The only audio file guaranteed to never start an argument. Discs like this could be used as a source for any number of sounds.

Now, these particular discs don't have a telephone ring, but they do have a lot of other things. [MALE ANNOUNCER: The white zone is for the immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no parking.] [FEMALE ANNOUNCER: The white zone is for the immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no parking.] One tricky thing with vinyl records, however, is that unless the record is perfectly centered, the pitch will rise and fall with each rotation. This happens because with an off-center disc, the speed of the groove as it passes through the stylus will increase and decrease repeatedly.

It's not that uncommon for the center hole of a record to be a little off center and the result is the dreaded wow! Listen to this recording from the Official Epcot Center Album. That's pretty bad. In fact, you can see the stylus moving left and right with each rotation, showing how off-center the hole was drilled on this disc. This is probably what happens when you hear this phone ring. Because the recording is of a pair of bells that have a constant pitch, it is easy to discern if the pitch has failed. Many movies were made that appear to use recordings from old vinyl records.

I guess the movie studios just archived these recordings and used them over and over again. Many people may not notice it, but those with a good ear for tone (or pedants) will. And I definitely have. And it bothers me a lot. But the most interesting thing for me is that these recordings continued to be used even into the 1990s. Listen to the phone ringing in this scene from Terminator 2. It's even worse than the last one! Opening it boldly and adding markers gives an interpeak time of about 1.85 seconds, close to the 1.8 seconds per revolution of a record 33 and a third rpm.

But really pedantic viewers might know that this sound effect is not only full of surprise, but it also sounds bad! John Connor's mom, and I'm putting this in quotes, answered a phone from Trimline. The Trimline phone only had a ringer on its ring and didn't sound like the Model 500. It should have sounded like this Argo clip. How's that for pedantry? Now, because it's the wrong ring, we know it's a recording anyway (although it hasn't made it to Goofs' IMDB page yet, who wants to add it?), but the fact that the movie is from 1991 makes it difficult. believe that no digital sound recording equipment was used on the set.

And I also find it curious that no one had bothered to make new recordings of these phones ringing. There are millions of these floating around, how difficult can it be to make a new digital recording? But I digress. As a side note, you may have noticed that I used a clip from the Dick Van Dyke show. On the air from 1961 to 1966, this program is full of Model 500s like this one. But throughout the show they use a completely different ring. [ROB: Oh! That's loud at night!] To be honest, it sounds like it's coming from an alarm clock.

I searched YouTube for older 500 models in case the ring had changed, but there is a red 1957 model 500 that sounds just like thesetwo. There is a link below if you are interested. Making a movie or TV show is a huge task, and sound designers deserve a lot of credit for all the post-production work they do. Much of the sound you hear in a movie comes not from the microphones on set, but from the people working behind the scenes to make everything sound real and believable. Terminator 2 actually won the Oscar for best sound design, but that phone ring bothers me.

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