Landline has been performed in Birmingham, Brussels, Búger, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Marseille, Mount Lawley, Pistoia, Poole and Stockholm…

I have vivid memories of my landline telephone in the home I grew up in. It was an old-style shiny black rotary dial phone, with its own table, accompanied with directory and phone book, all situated in the entrance hallway. As I grew up, the home telephone changed size and shape, the rotary dial disappeared and was replaced with touch-tone buttons, and then eventually it became cordless, liberating the user from its fixed location. I realized recently that I had not used my current landline telephone in a long time. It had fallen behind some furniture and become caked in dust. When I came to use it, it felt strange and the sounds it created made me curious about this somewhat endangered household object. I became fascinated with the dial-tone sound and later discovered that landline dial-tone sounds are not the same in every country. For some of my non-British friends and family, dial-tone pitches appeared to be a type of cultural sound emblem reminding them of home. The UK’s dial-tone is a combination of sine waves mixed from 350Hz and 450Hz, while the North American is a combination of 350Hz and 440Hz. In this piece I have explored my landline telephone in all its glory and have tried to recreate and reimagine the sounds of that first home telephone I remember from when I was younger.

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Landline was realized in 2018 at the composer’s studio in Manchester (England, UK) and premiered on December 6, 2018 during the Australasian Computer Music Conference (ACMC) 2018 in the Enright Studio of the Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts of Edith Cowan University in Mount Lawley (Western Australia, Australia). Many thanks go to Conserve the Sound (CTS) online museum — www.conservethesound.de — for granting permissions to borrow one of their archived dial telephone sounds (name: Fernsprechtischapparat; manufacturer: Deutsche Bundespost) and giving insight into the world of disappearing sounds. Landline was awarded the 1st prize at the 8th Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest (Toronto, Canada, 2018-19).

Premiere

December 6, 2018, ACMC 2018: The Music of Manuella Blackburn, Western Australia Academy of Performing Arts — Edith Cowan University – Enright Studio, Mount Lawley (Western Australia, Australia)