Years ago, when the time was plentiful and blood coursed through my veins under a healthy amount of pressure, I made some fun ‘outgoing messages’ for my answering machine. These days my home and work OGM’s are about as banal as watching Fred Rogers and Perry Como in a heated debate over Barry Manilow’s career had peaked with ‘Mandy’ or ‘Copacabana’. But there was a time during which I’d put a little creativity and technology to work, and come up with some fun stuff. Recently, my old roommate referenced one we’d made together, and it gave me cause to search out and retrieve a few.
The creation of these was due to a wonderful little Application called ‘SoundEdit’. The icon of which showed the beloved ‘Nipper’ from the RCA Victrola days, in front of a sound wave pattern. Using a simple adaptor and microphone or audio line in, you could record pretty much anything into the mac and begin to manipulate it in innumerable ways.
The message Matt reminded me of was one in which we recorded a dial tone and a phone hanging up. Then we recorded each of our voices picking up what was meant to sound like separate lines, and some follow up a conversation. A bit of rough post-production work later, it went a little something like this…
‘I Got It’
There were several others, including a 3-stooges montage, a holiday edit of It’s a Wonderful Life, a creepy Twin Peak’s homage with myself speaking backward, and a conflict when HAL 2000 takes over my answering machine. Sadly, most were never retained for posterity, or if they were, they’re on some obscure unlabeled CD backup buried in a box that will not be unearthed for a few more decades, and by then the format will be arcane and unreadable.
One other that did survive, however, was a personal favorite. It was a joke of sorts, akin to the wisecracking method of saying ‘hello’ and pausing on your message just long enough for the listener to think you really answered. But with this one, I used the capabilities of SoundEdit to add hiss, to warp, slow, speed up and ultimately jam the tape for the caller’s confused amusement… I thought I’d get lots of laughs and comments… All I got was dial tones. Go figure.
Warped Tape