Phone Tones in Musical Notation | Hacker News Reader

Phone Tones in Musical Notation

johndcook.com

63 pointszdw15 comments

Although it's interesting how the author breaks this down, I didn't think it was necessarily unknown that phone key tones could be used to make basic melodies.

When i get stuck in a freezer, I know that I can hack my phone (or a pocket calculator) to play certain songs with the key tones to alert my robot friend to save me. Thanks Johnny!

For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=euhipRI6bJ0

DTMF is by far the most popular system. Apparently Adobe Audition (formerly Cool Edit Pro) includes DTMF and another set of tones called "MF Signals (CCITT R1)", which I'll assume is quite obscure. The "MF Signals" could be used in creative exploration. Example: https://fun--tutorial.blogspot.com/2012/02/create-dtmf-telep...

Every time I dial a phone, I get the song Devo did on Yo Gabba Gabba[1] stuck in my head. I'm not sure if the tones in the song are accurate to real phone tones, but the (fake?) instrument suggests it was at least inspired by phone tones.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvtwTi_oC78

I had forgotten how weirdly addictive this show was. (kids have long outgrown it)

The music was top-notch and not just the guest songs.

It's not great but I play part of Mary Had a Little Lamb like: 3 2 1 2 333 222 3 99 3 2 1 2 333 222 3 2 1

Hello butcher shop how may I help you?

We had a very early touch tone phone that would silence one of the tone generators if you held down two buttons in the same row/column, so you could get pure-tone music out of it by dialing 3+6, 2+5, 1+4, 2+5, 3+6 3+6 3+6…

Yes, the classic Model 2500[1] touch tone phones would do this. It allowed you to play a more musically pleasing version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb", without the dissonance you got when pressing single keys.

This was a side-effect of how the old, mechanical keypads were built. You can see what the keypad looked like in the first minute of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfEUxHIDzPE

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_500_telephone#Model_2500

That’s the one! I had no idea it had its own Wikipedia page.

It's possible to decode DTMF in your head if you have a good ear for tones. You don't even need perfect pitch in many cases. Not very useful, but fun party trick I guess. Listen to someone dial a number and tell them what they dialed.

Vital (the free wavetable software synth) has a preset that has all the phone tones, including dial tone and call tone. I have spent an embarrassing amount of time playing with it.

Spoiler alert: 3 has the widest interval and * has the smallest. Time to write a phone-inspired composition.

Doesn't have the fourth column, at 1633 Hz.

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