Elmer Cat

PhoneTrips

Back in the 1970’s a young man with the moniker “Evan Doorbell” had the foresight to recognize that the era of electromechanical telephony would soon be coming to an end. All of the rich, beautiful, analog sounds that the old network made would disappear forever. The interesting peculiarities that made each local central office sound unique would be replaced with boring uniformity as switching became electronic and subsequently digitized.

Before that happened, Evan made what he called “Phone Trips”, where he’d travel to various communities all around the nation and make recordings of what it sounded like to make phone calls from different places. When making his recordings, he’d “play with the phone” so as make the equipment do funky things that also demonstrates how it all worked.

If you enjoy any of the sampled telephone sounds featured on ElmerCat.org I encourage you to visit Evan’s PhoneTrips.com site and listen to him tell the full stories. You may share anything posted here, but please respect Evan’s wishes by doing so freely to anyone, without charge.

For your convenience, selections from the PhoneTrips.com library are posted below for you to enjoy and download.