The history of phone phreaking has fascinated me since I was a kid and first learned that people explored the telephone network as a hobby. In junior high I learned a trick using a paper clip on a payphone to get free phone calls -usually back home in Westwood from Cheviot telling my parents I'd be out skateboarding longer -or asking for a ride. Or to page someone to try and get some weed. I remember being sold a joint of oregano instead. 

I always thought I'd like to learn to phone phreak, but that era was already mostly dead out just as I was learning about it. Instead I got on to bulletin board systems before right around the time America Online was getting online. The phreaks still called to my imagination.

When I read the book Exploding the Phone by Phil Lapsley I got a much more intimate history of the phreaks behind the phones. One of those was a guy named Joybubbles. He was born in Richmond Virginia on 25 May 1949,  as Josef Carl Engressia, Jr.

Joybubbles was a maverick who had perfect pitch. That talent allowed him to whistle his way through the phone system. 2600 hertz was the magic key to get you into the Ma Bell's magic telecommunications kingdom. 

A bit more background may be necessary here. It all dates back to the time AT&T implemented automatic switches. These used tone dialing, a form of in-band signaling. There were tones used intended only for AT&T personell, but if a person with a phone happened to know those tones, they could use them even if they didn't work for the company. The 2600 hz tone caused a phone switch to think a call had ended while still leaving the carrier line open, allowing those who knew how to do it to make free long distance and international calls -at a time when these were very expensive. 

It was a huge loophole in the phone system the phreaks started to exploit and build a culture around. Joybubbles is credited with having discovered the tone around 1957, though at that time he still went by Joe Engressia. He was seven years old and blind. He figured out that whistling the fourth E above middle C (a frequency of 2637.02 Hz) would stop a dialed phone recording. Not knowing what he had done, he called up the phone company and asked why the recordings had stopped. Joe Engressia is considered to be the father of phreaking. After he learned what it did, he began to use the ability to make friends and talk on the phone with people around the country.

Other phreaks started figuring out the 2600 secret as well. Bill Acker ("Bill from New York" on the phone lines) figured out how the operating principles of the network. He used a tape recorder to play a 2600 tone to the same effect. John Draper who was friends with Joe discovered the whistles that came as a free toy in Cap'n Crunch  boxes produced the necessary tone, and he took his nome de phreak from the sugary cereal.   

When Joe went to the University of South Florida in the late 1960s he earned himself the nickname "the Whistler" for his many mighty phone feats. He had figured out how to make the phone company think he was calling from a different location, thus circumventing the chance of being traced, and more importantly, the chance of getting billed, or worse. Still, he did get caught and disciplined by the University.

After picking up a degree in philosophy he  moved to Tennessee where he continued to be a phreak. Eventually the phone detectives tracked him down. The phone company SBT&T first noticed his phreaking activities in summer 1968, and an employee of the Florida Bell Telephone Company illegally monitored Engressia's telephone conversations before ratting him out to the Feds.

He was arrested and charged with malicious mischief. It might have been mischief, but he was just having fun, talking to people, exploring the network, and seeing what he could do. He got a fair amount of publicity from his arrest and the public adored him as a blind genius. It also helped spread the art of phreaking to others who wouldn't have heard about it had news not ran with the story. 

​He subsequently gave up phreaking, but remained active with ham radio. It shouldn't be suprising but many phreaks were also hams. Joe had the call sign WB0RPA, and held an amateur extra class license, the highest grade issued. He also earned both a General radiotelephone operator license and a commercial radiotelegraph operator's license, as well as a ship radar endorsement on these certificates. He even qualified for the now-obsolete aircraft radiotelegraph endorsement on the latter license, a license few people rarely got in the first place. 

He also remained active operating phone story lines. Story lines and joke lines were something phone enthusiasts put together with rudimentary answering machines. A number was given out for the line, and a person could call and listen to the recording, of jokes, the story, or whatever other subject the operator chose to speak about.  "Stories and Stuff" was the name of one his lines which he usually updated on the weekend. In the early 1980s, he ran a phone line called the "Zzzzyzzerrific Funline." It was listed in the very last entry in the phone book. On the Zzzzyzzerrific Funline he called himself Highrise Joe and would rant about how much he loved Valleyfair amusement park. Another regular topic he talked about was Up with People, a non-profit that promotes a five-month program involving travel, the performing arts, volunteering, and various workshops focused around intercultural communication to teach young adults how to interact in a multi-cultural environment and create change in communities with varying needs.

In the 1980's Joe started using and then adopted the name Joybubble's. This was followed by a decision to quit being an adult and leave his responsibilities behind him. Part of this decision came as his way of reclaiming the childhood he had lost as someone who had been abused as a kid.

In 1982 he moved to Minneapolis where he established the Church of Eternal Childhood. He became an ordained minister and set it up as a non-profit. The visionary aim of his church was to help adults reclaim the joys of childhood. He lived a monastic lifestyle in support of this goal, supporting himself on disability with occassional side gigs doing research on smells for the scent industry. Part of the outreach of his church involved reading to kids at library's and setting up phone calls to kids with terminal illnesses. He neve did lose the love of the phone. 

In 1991 he changed his name legally to Joybubbles. He used the name as the line in the sand between the unhappiness of his own childhood and the life he made for himself. 

From the time he changed his name until his death on August 8, 2007 he continued to do the work he felt mattered most: spreading a sense of childlike wonder to the world. 

“I wish everybody would take a little time, even if it’s only once a month, to get out of the rat race into the sandbox and play like a child.”

From his little apartment in Minneapolis he reached out across the telephone to people all over the world to give them his unique take on life, and spread his joy. 

“People ask me: ‘What’s your secret of happiness? You seem to be happy most of the time, when we meet up with you.’ Well, I’ll tell ya: I think one of my greatest secrets of happiness is that I can cry really hard when I need to, and I can let myself feel way, way sad. I think that crying is not a breakdown; it’s a breakthrough, and sometimes when I’m putting myself together, I have to let myself come apart.”

.:. .:. .:.
​
Sources: 
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/us/20engressia.html
https://www.twincities.com/2015/03/13/daily-juggle-my-child-led-me-back-to-joybubbles-the-eternal-5-year-old/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joybubbles

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Science is at its best when it engages our imaginative abilities as much as our faculties for reason and logic. Dr. Fiorella Terenzi is an astrophysicist, professor, author and musician who exemplifies the fusion of imagination with scientific research. Through her embrace of the imaginative, emotional and subjective side of life she has helped return human warmth to the study of the stars. The prevalent reductionist and materialistic world view of many scientists and astronomers often strips the sense of wonder out of the study of the stars and the galaxy. These powerful radiant and mysterious planets, asteroids, and black holes then just become objects on a plotted map explained with abstract theorems, rather than things of beauty, mystery and the ineffable.

“I enthusiastically embrace the fabulous new discoveries of astrophysics, but I do not want to stop there. I want these discoveries to swim in our imaginations,” she says “to open our hearts to new ways of thinking and feeling about life, about men and women. I want us all to hear how the music of the spheres resonates with the music of our hearts.”

To conjure up an intimate portrait of the universe she has sketched out a new way of investigating the cosmos which she calls Acoustic Astronomy or Radio Computer Music Astronomy. This still nascent field marries the knowledge of the visible universe with that of the sonorous universe. This union allows for new ways of experiencing astronomical discoveries and developments. It also owes a lot of its practice to the practice of data sonification [explored in Chapter 3.]

The Italian Dr. Terenzi received her doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Milan. Her doctoral work included the field of computer music where she focused on creating a class of sound based on data sourced from radio astronomy. Her education also included musical training in operatic singing and piano from the Civic School of Music in Milan. 
She has gone on to teach at the University of Milan, lecture in countless schools and at the time of this writing is on the faculty at Florida International University in Miami. She is a tireless educator of the public on the beauty that abounds in the universe, and one of the ways she has brought this love to people is through her musical recordings. Her first album Music from the Galaxies, released in 1991, is the exemplar of Acoustic Astronomy music and is a fine album of electronic music in general. For this album she utilized the raw data from UGC 6697, a strange spiral galaxy approximately 180-million light years from Earth, located in Abell 1367, the Leo cluster.

In the liner notes to her album Terenzi explains. “UGC 6697 is an irregular galaxy presenting a peculiar radio source which seems due to a dynamic interaction between the galaxy and the galactic medium. UGC 6697 contains a circular ring of ionized gas. The dynamics are highly complex due to the presence of a small companion galaxy. A collision between the two galaxies may have occurred, causing a flow of gas to emerge from the galaxy and triggering star formation on the bright side of the ring structure.”
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UGC 6697 was studied by Professor G. Gavazzi also from the University of Milan. A number of radio telescopes made observations in the spectrum including the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope at 0.6, 1.4 and 5 Gigahertz. The Very Large Array in Socorro, New Mexico captured data at 1.4 Gigahertz as well. Using the 4 meter Kitt Peak National Obersavtory in neighboring Arizona, blue, red and H-aplha frames were obtained. Spectral data from the 3.6 meter European Southern Observatory Telescope in Germany was also obtained and used. 

All of this data was given to Terenzi from Gavazzi on a digital tape. Terenzi says, “Every kind of celestial radiation can be represented by a stream of numbers.” Those streams of numbers from the tape she converted to sound using the Cmusic program created by Professor F. Richard Moore from the Center for Music Experiment in San Diego. 

Moore had previously worked with Max Matthews on the development of Music V and the GROOVE system at Bell Laboratories. Then he skipped off to get a masters and then Ph.D in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Stanford University in 1977. While he was there Moore built the FRMBox, a realtime digital music synthesizer. Then he joined the UC San Diego music faculty in 1979, founding the Computer Audio Research Laboratory (CARL Project) at the Center for Music Experiment and Related Research (CME, now CRCA: Center for Research in Computing and the Arts). He was the director for the Center from 1982 to 1991.

Moore also wrote one of the standard books on computer music, Elements of Computer Music, which goes into detail about the software he had also written, cmusic and pcmusic. The book and the programs are all still used by musicians today, thirty plus years on at the time of this writing.

One of the things cmusic can do is take a description of an acoustic sound and transform it into the digital numbers that can in turn be converted into a waveform, something a person can listen to, off a hardrive or burned onto a CD.

What Terenzi did was to make an analogy between galactic radiation and musical notes. She had the insight that both radio waves and sound waves have frequency and intensity. She used csound to convert the frequency and intensity to something listenable.

Of the music itself she writes, “There are some interesting aspects of the galactic sounds. Some parts seem to be well tuned around B-flat or D-minor. If you listen carefully, you can also hear several new accords and harmonies, linked together following their special sidereal rules. The predominant microtonality of the galaxy is something that could be explored during research by creating new scales and timbers. The galaxy itself can be used as a musical instrument if it is broken into fragments or combined with classical instruments.”
​
The innovations she has made as an Acoustic Astronomer have been picked up more in the arts and music world than in the laboratories of the scientist. A number of musicians who were both inspired by ambient space music combined its liminality with the tool of sonification to create records that utilized astronomical data as part of their source material.
Terenzi herself went on to work on CD-ROMs when that was a thing, write books, make more music, teach, and no matter what form it took, share her passion for the music of the spheres.  

.:. .:. .:.
Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory series. 

Sources:
Music from the Galaxies, 1991, Island Records
fiorella.com
https://faculty.fiu.edu/~fterenzi/
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a15478/fiorella-terenzi-acoustic-astronomy/
https://skyandtelescope.org/observing/are-you-ready-willing-and-abell/
https://music-cms.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/memoriam/f-richard-moore/index.html
​

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All good things begin with explosions –the universe through the creative act of the big bang, the creation of a new life through the big bang of love and orgasm, and neutron stars when a star somewhere between four to eight times as massive as our own sun explodes into a supernova. If the star had been larger and more massive when it went supernova it would keep on collapsing and turn into a black hole. As the protons and electrons melt away in the all-consuming fire, the core of the star collapses in on itself and the electrons and protons melt into each other to form the super dense neutron star.

Neutron stars are the smallest and densest of the currently known stellar objects. They are about the size of a small city, close to that of Manhattan Island, with a diameter of 20 kilometers. Their mass however is 1.4 times that of our sun. Gravity on a neutron star is near 2 billion times that experienced on earth. A single sugar cube would way a billion tons. The gravitation on these objects is so strong it bends the radiation of light.
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These things also spin at incredibly fast speeds, continuing to move on the momentum and energy imparted to them by the supernova explosion. They can spin as fast as 43,000 rotations per minute gradually decelerating as the force of their creation dissipates.

Some neutron stars are like lighthouses. Pulses of cosmic electromagnetic material beam out of them at nearly the speed of light. As these beams sweep past Earth they flicker like the powerful lantern or bulb inside the lighthouse. Even though this “light” is always on, it can only be detected when the keeper of the lighthouse sweeps the beam in the direction of Earth.    

Though neutron stars had been theorized as far back as the 1930s, the wild spinning ones with extreme magnetic fields that emitted radio waves and came to be known as pulsars were first detected in 1967 by Anthony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell Burnell who were working together at the Mullard Radio Astronomical Observatory in Cambridge in 1967.

Bell had made an observation that Hewish recognized as being something deserving of further investigation, a regular pattern of pulsed radio signals. One thought was that they were caused by interference from Earth. They also had to speculate that the signals were coming from intelligent extraterrestrial life forms sending out cosmic communiques. Yet Hewish had a hunch that they were instead emissions from certain stars.

On this extraterrestrial matter Bell Burnell said, “we did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem—if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe, how does one announce the results responsibly?"

Looking at the matter closely they observed that pulses were separated by 1:33 seconds and originated from the same place in the sky. The pulses kept to sidereal time, and the shortness of them eliminated most then-known astrophysical sources for the emissions. The rate of the pulse also eliminated that it was of human origin. They looked for the signal using another radio telescope and when it was detected this eliminated the possibility that it was caused by a fault in the instrumentation.
​
They gave the signal the nickname LGM-1, for “Little Green Men” in playful honor of the possible origin. When a second pulsating signal was discovered in a different part of the sky the “Little Green Men” hypothesis was given up. Officially the pulsar was given the name CP 1919, and now has a few other names as well, PSR B1919+21 and PSR J1921+2153, none as easy to remember as LGM-1. Though first studied on radio wavelengths, have also been found to emit gamma rays, x-rays, as well as physical light.

PSR B1919+21 went on to have a life of its own in the burgeoning indie music underground. Bernard Sumner, lead guitarist and founding member of Joy Division, had noticed a unique image when leafing through the 1977 edition of the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy. He thought it might be an enigmatic picture to use as the cover for an album. What he happened to be looking at was a stacked plot of pulses from B1919+21.

 In the book itself there wasn’t much information about who made the image. There was the little caption that said, “Successive pulses from the first pulsar discovered, CP 1919, are here superimposed vertically. The pulses occur every 1.337 seconds. They are caused by rapidly spinning neutron star.” That was that. In the January 1971 issue of Scientific American the plot also made an appearance with a credit saying it was based on data collected from the Arecibo Radio Observatory, though no specific creator is given for the image itself.

The original creator of the plot chart was eventually tracked down by journalist and science writer Jen Christiansen. She noted that, “the charts from Bell at Mullard were output in real time, using analogue plotting tools. A transition in technology from analogue to digital seemed to have been taking place between the discovery of pulsars in 1967 to the work being conducting at Arecibo in 1968 through the early 1970′s. A cohort of doctoral students from Cornell University seemed to be embracing that shift, working on the cutting edge of digital analysis and pulsar data output.” So she combed through the work of students at the time and managed to trace the image to a PhD thesis by Harold D. Craft, Jr. titled “Radio Observations of the Pulse Profiles and Dispersion Measures of Twelve Pulsars.”
​
Sumner passed along the image to Peter Saville, the graphic designer for the cover of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and co-founder of Factory Records, who released the album.. Saville concurred that the image would make a great cover. The band wanted to use the image as it had originally appeared black-on-white, but Saville convinced the colors would look better reversed to white-on-black. "I was afraid it might look a little cheap. I was convinced that it was just sexier in black," he said.

Following Unknown Pleasure the band released a seven inch single of their song “Transmission.” The lyrics exhort the listeners to “dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio.” Continuing with the astronomical theme the sleeve contained an image of a distant galaxy.

Joy Division left an indelible stamp on the underground music scene and the development of post-punk. Their career was painfully short, a micro blip of time, as quick and fast as the radio burst transmitted by a pulsar. Ian Curtis the lead singer had been struggling with epilepsy, a failing marriage, and a deep depression and he took his own life in 1980 at the age of 23.

Their career was cut painfully short when Ian Curtis lost his battle to suicide less than a year since the release of their debut single. Although they were only together for such a short space of time, Joy Division helped change alternative music forever with their dark lyrics coupled with Curtis’ trademark delivery which were so unlike anybody else at the time. The other band members went on to found New Order as the dawn faded into day.
​
Through the use of radio astronomy images as a source for innovative graphic design derived from data Joy Division set a precedent. Later musicians and artists would take that cue, along with the tools of data sonification and use it to create music from the vast pools of astrophysical information being created by researchers. 

Read the rest of the Radiophonic Laboratory series.

Sources:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/pop-culture-pulsar-origin-story-of-joy-division-s-unknown-pleasures-album-cover-video/

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/joy-divisions-unknown-pleasures-cover-the-science-behind-an-image-191126/

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/joy-divisions-unknown-pleasures-cover-the-science-behind-an-image-191126/

Encyclopedia Brittanica

21st Century Astronomy

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