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