Recently, Michael Nutt visited New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) with his four-year-old son. Like most children of that age, he failed to appreciate the nuance and sophistication present in most of the art. But there was one exhibit that he did enjoy: John Giorno’s Dial-a-Poem. That was originally built in 1968 and lets visitors hear recordings of narrated poems when they call specific numbers. To keep his son entertained and exposed to the arts at home, Nutt built his own version of Dial-a-Poem.
When Giorno first built Dial-a-Poem in the late ‘60s, it required the creative use of the contemporary technology. That included four rotary phones for visitors to interact with, an answering machine — tech that, surprisingly, had existed for decades at that time — and a reel-to-reel tape recorder.
Mutt wanted to recreate the feel of Dial-a-Poem, but was happy to utilize today’s technology to do so. For that reason, the primary interface is a rotary phone and everything else is modern. Specifically, Nutt used a Western Electric Bell 500 telephone. Those were ubiquitous in America throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s, and are therefore still affordable today. It is easy to find a model 500 in good condition on eBay for around $25.
Instead of cannibalizing that phone to add the necessary functionality, Nutt left it intact and built a local phone system for it to work with. An old server that sits under Nutt’s desk runs Asterisk, which is an open-source PBX (Private Branch eXchange). It is a bit like a modern software version of an old timey office building’s switchboard. The model 500 rotary phone connects to that through a Grandstream GS-HT802 VoIP adapter, with a Raspberry Pi acting as a WiFi bridge to the Asterisk PBX.
This setup may seem convoluted, but Nutt had a good reason for choosing it. The use of the PBX lets the phone dial different extensions to access different functions. Some let Nutt’s son actually dial out to call people on a list of family contacts—and vice-versa. That’s possible because the PBX can connect the phone to a VoIP phone number. Nutt’s son can dial a different extension to hear a joke, told using a text-to-speech service. A similar extension even lets him hear train status information from NYC’s MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority), because he’s already inheriting his dad’s nerdiness at just four.
