With the general retirement of traditional landlines, classic telephones have been reduced to a simple curiosity—a retro gadget overloaded with nostalgia. Yet on the web, we can find many projects that seek to repurpose them one way or another. One of the most interesting is Whispering Wires, a creation of YouTuber Rootkid. Essentially, he took one of these phones and modified it to play a poem every time the user lifts the handset.
In my region, the only ways to have a landline are to use something like a 4G modem (with very dubious performance), or surrender to the tyranny of VoIP, which depends on internet connectivity and the availability of electrical power. The classic service has disappeared completely, and many of the devices distributed by companies have ended up in markets, flea markets, and online stores. Today they are an icon of nostalgia, a reminder of simpler times... and more expensive calls.
But they are not necessarily useless. Behind every obsolete device lies the potential to upgrade it, and in the past we have already seen ideas like converting them into videophones with the help of a smartphone. That same potential brings us to Rootkid's YouTube channel, where his first video introduces "Whispering Wires"—"Whispering Cables" in translation.
Whispering Wires: Poetry on the Phone
After passing through a store in London and observing visitors pick up the handset of an old phone and immediately bring it to their ears, Rootkid concluded that he had to do something to replace the inevitable silence. An online search allowed him to acquire an old Socotel 63 with buttons, used in France during the '60s. It even has a copy of the circuit inside (which reminds us that repair was not a luxury, but a couple of scoundrels stole it), but to connect it to the internet and process audio, Rootkid took advantage of the virtues of a Raspberry Pi Zero, backed by two amplifiers.
Coordinating the operation of the Raspberry Pi and audio playback every time the user lifts the handset is no small task, but the biggest challenge was finding a sufficiently large source of poems. That's when the Poetry Foundation comes to the rescue, with thousands of recorded poems. The "problem" is that each poem has a brief introduction (and in some cases an ending), but Rootkid solved it with an AI module called WhisperX, which automatically transcribes audio. With that information he was able to determine the "real" beginning and end of each poem, more than three thousand according to his calculations.
The last step is to make the audio sound like an "old phone". All he needed was an 8 kHz resampling and a filter to discard certain frequencies (keeping the narrowband from 300–3400 Hz). With the original speaker, the effect is even better. Unfortunately, Rootkid did not share further technical details, but I imagine there will be a deeper guide in the future.
