Spoken Word with Electronics

SPOKEN WORD WITH ELECTRONICS #35: Mr Rogers' Rare Words From 1983 on Death and Childhood Illness

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the show. This week is a tribute to Mr Rogers. I have one rare tape on Mr Rogers in my library of unusual records, and when I share this with people I present it as "a side of Mr Rogers you may have never heard." Most listeners agree: This is a very incredible album. Specifically, this is Fred Rogers translating the complexity of death and pain into helping parents deal with a huge fear: The death of their kids. He also relates similar comfort to kids themselves. And then you meet the children, who are all wonderful, happy, and seemingly more aware of the moment than many adults three times their age. I'm posting it this week because we need more compassion in the world, presently.

This is what the 1983 cassette "Healing with Love" is all about, and its obscure placement in the Mr Rogers discography only makes it more interesting. This wasn't work for PBS. It was seemingly only intended for the patients and their parents, and copies of the tape were produced in small numbers. There is no way this topic would have made it onto his show (though Bruce Haack on Mr Rogers is a favorite in that category)

This tape celebrates the word of Dr Gerald Jampolsky, who is a kindred spirit of Fred Rogers. You are introduced to Jampolsky, his group of patients, their parents, and then encounter some frightening moments with a parent grieving a dead child. Dr Jampolsky manages a phone hotline for terminally ill children and consoles parents, both those grieving a death or managing stress, and Jampolsky's love and care for everyone is to be admired. Hear the entire tape here.

Of course, we had to make a tribute to all of this, and that can be found in Side A for this week, "Mr Roger's Metaphysical Phone Hotline" including some of the more intense Mr Rogers sentences I've ever heard. Here's one: "Do you consider death an enemy?" – Wild.

Side B for this week continues our serial Charlie Pickle. This week introduces you to your first day's work at Company Statistics, where both you and Charlie work, and you're given some tips on helping everyone out with the coffee.

HEALING WITH LOVE

Gerald Jampolsky and Fred Rogers

"A moving account of the healing roles love and support can play in children's critical illnesses" — made available to children and parents in 1983 for purposes of therapy, via cassette.

Episode 35, Side A: "Mister Rogers' Metaphysical Phone Line" (Do You Consider Death An Enemy?) by Spoken Word with Electronics

Episode 35, BONUS: "Fred Rogers Soundboard" by Spoken Word with Electronics

Episode 35, Side B: "DRINK ALL THE COFFEE" (Charlie Pickle, Part 17) by Spoken Word with Electronics

SPOKEN WORD WITH ELECTRONICS #34: Making Music with 2600 Hz Tones and Firmware Audio Update Files

Number-based trivia: 2600, the hacker quarterly, is named after this 2600 hertz tone, which is a single tone that can override a payphone's pricing controls with one single command.

Hi everyone, welcome back to the show. This week is about loud noises made by computers. Awful sounds like modems, faxes, and my favorite unbearable noise: The firmware update file. Firmware can be updated via an audio file and to demonstrate this, we discuss audio files from Korg's Monotribe, the W-slash sampler from Whimsical Raps, and Nanoloop.

I thought it would be fun to make comforting music from these noises, and you can jump to "The Roomba is Dreaming" to hear the end result. The discussion for this week is a demonstration of using envelope generators to smooth out the harsh tones of a firmware file. In particular, a trapezoid generator based on an EMS Synthi is used to pull out tonal rhythms.

Last week's Boing Boing post on "Booting DOS from vinyl" reminded me of cassette drive loading. We had an Atari 400 and an 800, and both of those used cassettes to load many of their games. I used to love that noise, and I expect Atari filtered the sound of the cassettes themselves, otherwise risk injuring the ears of kids who put the cassettes (intended for a computer) into their walkman (it would still play, after all). So you'll learn about Zaxxon, Frogger, and my favorite Atari cassette-based game: Salmon Run.

All of these sound files work to load data because a lot can be communicated in a tone. If you think about a phone dialer, it is twelve separate pitched notes (0-9, pound and asterix) – These tones are used for any number of aggravating automated systems when you call customer service lines, and they also connect your call. There are a few tones never intended for you to hear, however, including the 2600 hertz tone, which was a tone generated by a payphone when a call was concluded.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak unofficially began Apple Computers with a phone phreaking device called the Blue Box. It was a device that sent out a 2600 hertz tone to fake (or phake) the sound of a phone getting disconnected. The two callers would remain on the phone, however, allowing a free call without billing. So in our introduction this week I demonstrate the 2600 hertz tone using a wonderful iphone app called Phonal Tonal, which replicates a Blue Box, Green Box, and a Red Box.

Episode 34, Demonstration: "Envelope Filtering Audio-Based Firmware Update Files" by Spoken Word with Electronics

Episode 34, Side A: "The Roomba is Dreaming" (Music made from Firmware Update Files) by Spoken Word with Electronics

Episode 34, Side B: "Happy Birthday, Susan" (Charlie Pickle, Pt 16) by Spoken Word with Electronics

SPOKEN WORD WITH ELECTRONICS #33: A BAKED HAM DINNER (Thanksgiving Special)

Hear Betty Crocker's "Cooking for the Blind" series from the 1950's, and prepare a Thanksgiving Dinner with canned food.

Hi, everyone, welcome back to the show. This week is our first Thanksgiving Episode, and with most of us opting to stay home and not travel this year, I thought I'd share one of my favorite records in my collection. This is a 40 album set from The Minnesota Department of Public Welfare. Specifically this is a part of the "Talking Books for the Blind" – an endeavor that is still very much alive in public education. I have a friend who has read trigonometry into a recorder for use in math courses at the university level for decades, as an example.

Betty Crocker's 1954 "Good and Easy Cookbook" was recorded, in full, for this series of vinyl. The fidelity is choppy, as these are flexidiscs with a loud noise floor. There's another issue, too: My copy, which might be the only complete surviving set, arrived to my home years back COVERED IN OIL AND BUTTER. I'm completely baking serious, here. This is 50-70 years of sludge from a set that got used. But I had no idea to prepare for this as the seller indicated the set of records as "looks in good condition" – So this episode I'll also discuss how to detoxify and clean up old records with vinegar, alcohol, and distilled water. I used my Vestax Handy Trax to do the recording, as I can easily swap out the needle.

The Good and Easy Cookbook, Services for the Blind Edition, Minnesota Department of Public Welfare, ca. 1956. was an entire cookbook in a small stack of green flexidisc vinyl. Half of the stack are index records, where each recipe is read aloud with a 'page' number. The other discs are the 'pages' – So, a recipe on page 42 would be on the disc marked "P – 42".

This is an awesome piece of accessibility history. For the discussion this week, I go through the records and show the futility and difficulty of actually USING them, however. You have to listen to each index for the recipe, which gives you a disc number for the recipe itself. None of the labels are in braille, and a blind cook would need to listen carefully to an index and then find the corresponding vinyl for the actual recipe itself. To demonstrate this, I thought it would be fun to cook an entire Thanksgiving dinner following this method with the vinyl. You can cook along with the show at home.

The 1950s were a fun canned time for food. On top of odd dishes that mixed mayonnaise with pineapple, or 500 different things you can do with brine, there was the boon in CONVENIENCE FOODS, which was canned food, powdered foods, preserved foods, bleached food, etc. The cooking for the blind series relies heavily on this, as "a can of tomatoes" is a unit measurement, and much easier an instruction that an actual, inconsistently sized and seasonally unavailable tomato. And the pudding recipes are great, too. I remember powdered pudding from my 1980s childhood. While canned food is somewhat out of practice for fine dining, powdered spices are still very much alive. This recording set shows you hundreds of different things to do with this pantry, either for a home meal or storage for your bomb shelter.

The introduction for this week also discusses the 16 RPM record format, which was part of the Talking Books for the Blind series, as it allowed up to 40 minutes a side on a single disc.

Popular Mechanics reported in 1957 that Chrysler would be offering these 16 RPM turntables in their car's glove compartment. Find a link to a PDF of this item in the Boing Boing post at https://boingboing.net/tag/spoken-word-with-electronics

Have a very good holiday, E