Spoken Word with Electronics

Episode 24, Side A: Every Radio on the Road (Charlie Pickle, Part Seven) by Spoken Word with Electronics

Episode 24, Side B: "Electronic Electricity Session" (Outro) by Spoken Word with Electronics

SPOKEN WORD WITH ELECTRONICS #23: 1980s Telephone Voting Hardware

Greetings everyone, welcome back to the show. This week we look back at telephone polling hardware from the 1980s and ask the question: "What if they'd evolved into how we vote in elections?" The technology for phone voting became pretty robust, including synthesized voices and other nice ideas. But nice ideas are quickly exploited, so it got quickly monetized into the foul world of 1-900 numbers.

The monetization of spending 50¢ to call a 1-900 number and leave an opinion destroyed public perception of the phone as a democratic tool, but before that happened there were a few wonderful innovations. Bell Labs had been working on voice recognition since the 1950s, for example, and this week's episode of SWWE focuses on one company's effort to develop two devices: The simply named TELEPHONE POLL from 1982 and the exotic named follow-up, the ESCAPE-600, from 1986. Here is a collection of brochures and other material on both the TELEPHONE POLL and the ESCAPE-600: http://www.ep.tc/telephone-voting

We also discuss the September 15th "Burn Your Mask" day, which Media Matters has chronicled here in full idiocy: https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/facebook-allowing-campaign-ditch-face-masks-en-masse-spread

https://soundcloud.com/eptc/sets/spoken-word-with-electronics-episode-23

Episode 23, Discussion: "1980s Telephone Polling Hardware" by Spoken Word with Electronics

Episode 23, Side B: "Weekly Electronic Drum Solo #1" (Outro) by Spoken Word with Electronics

Episode 23, Side A: "The Lobby" (Charlie Pickle, Pt 5) by Spoken Word with Electronics

Greetings, all. Welcome back to the show. This week, the discussion is on meditation and making our body into a conductive circuit. A meditation device called the SOMA Quantum Ocean arrived from Russia last month. It's an experimental device from Moscow that has four coin-shaped sensor pads.

The device arrives with a book (also downloadable here as the "QO Book") of exercises to perform while you are meditating. This list of exercises suggest thinking different things or focusing on different goals when in session with the device, and seeing if the sounds change. They might!

This episode of SWWE includes a demo of twenty minutes of Quantum Ocean sound, along with instructions from the first session, which asks you to identify one path of noise in the chaos of the audio and follow it as it moves within the sea of other noises.

Two of the pads send a small amount of voltage through your body, and two of the pads are radio receivers. Essentially this is similar to a feedback loop, using your body to complete a signal path. This is a barely detectable amount of voltage but it's enough to be perceived. To test this, another SOMA device, the ETHER, is used in the demo. At about 9:00 of the demo track, you'll hear the Ether interpret the Ocean.

Chaos Theory, Experimental Circuit Electricity, Shamanistic Psychology, and Russian Mind Research aside, the Quantum Ocean plays a saturating and pleasing stereo noise field of noise. The QO receivers interpret all sorts of interference, including whatever transmission your body's electrical pulse produces through this contacts, and it blends into the audio you hear in the headphones. There are few products that think about thought or noise in this way. It's a fascinating, mentally liberating, and optimistic device.

https://soundcloud.com/eptc/sets/spoken-word-with-electronics-episode-22

Episode 22, Demo: What Does the Soma Quantum Ocean Sound Like? (Meditation Tool) by Spoken Word with Electronics

Episode 22, Side A: "SUNSET DRIVE" by Spoken Word with Electronics

Episode 22, Side B: "The Last Home On This Street is a Duplex" by Spoken Word with Electronics