One of my longest friends is a DJ in Detroit. They hosted a party around the theme “infolines”, which were the phone numbers you would call to get indirect ticket and venue information for underground raves. The party was full of art and vinyl from the Detroit techno scene, and they wanted one exhibit to be interactive – give the attendees some phones playing real infoline recordings. Pretty cool.

Ingredients

How we did it

We tested continuity across the phone hook contacts until we isolated the wires we could use to “press” the playback button on the sound board. These turned out to be the (brown/grey) and (yellow/grey) wires. We cut the push button from the sound board and soldered in the telephone hook wires. This was pretty obvious in the desk phones, not so obvious in the all-in-one handsets.

Next, we needed to connect the sound board output to the telephone’s handset speaker. The most elegant way to do this was to use the existing wires from the handset connector in the telephone’s base. This, too, was pretty obvious in the desk phones, not so obvious in the all-in-one handsets.

Gallery

Verdict

Worked great! Check out the Infolines record label here: https://linktr.ee/infolinesmusic

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