1000 Digits of Pi, Recited by Jane Barbe, Famous Voice of Telephone Company Recordings

in Math | October 2nd, 2014 3 Comments

If you came of age dur­ing the 1960s and 1970s, you knew the voice of Jane Barbe, aka “The Tele­phone Lady.” Her voice appeared on tele­phone com­pa­ny record­ings and voice­mail sys­tems across the US. Just lis­ten to this clip, and you will imme­di­ate­ly know who I’m talk­ing about.

Any­way, Ms. Barbe appar­ent­ly had more in her reper­toire than “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up.” A lot more.

Above, we have her recit­ing the first 1,000 dig­its of Pi. The back­sto­ry remains unknown to us. We did some research and came up bone dry. If you know some­thing about the cir­cum­stances behind the record­ing, please let us know in the com­ments sec­tion below. To read along with a tran­script of the record­ing, just click here.

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via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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Saul Bass Gives Ma Bell a Com­plete Makeover, 1969

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Comments (3)
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  • Sam Bull says:
    October 2, 2014 at 1:45 pm

    Well, just imag­ine how long it took her to record every phone num­ber in the Unit­ed States. :)

    And such a pro­fes­sion­al: Each dig­it is pro­nounced so con­sis­tent­ly!

    Reply
  • Max Kapelanski says:
    October 2, 2014 at 2:43 pm

    This is not J.B. recit­ing the 1st 1000 dig­its of Pi. This is a mon­tage of 10 dig­its read by J.B. arranged in the sequence of the first 1000 dig­its of Pi. This could well have been cre­at­ed by an elec­tron­ic radio artist (usu­al­ly also a radio tech­ni­cian). In the old­er days of radio, sound artists were part of teams. @Kapelanski — sound stud­ies schol­ar

    Reply
  • David says:
    March 14, 2017 at 5:35 pm

    Few lines of code to feed in pi and map that to 10 wav files and record the result :)

    Reply

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