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Most of this is the line itself, calibrated to sit near the edge of hearing. The piece is designed for headphones in a quiet room. The volume control is an unweighted output gain: 0 dB outputs the piece as rendered, without additional processing in the signal path. Raising the gain pushes the loudest fragments into a clipping guard, which the readout reports as it acts. Above −3 dBFS, the guard applies hyperbolic tangent shaping to peak amplitudes.
The piece is synthesised from the ITU-T Recommendations that govern voiceband modem connections over copper subscriber loops: V.8 (network interaction and the 2100 Hz ANSam answer tone), V.34 (Phase 2 line probing and discrete spectral SNR estimation), and V.21 (300 bit/s frequency-shift keying). All audio is generated in the browser without pre-recorded samples.
The V.34 line probe carries no user data. It evaluates the transmission channel before data transfer by emitting two probing comb signals across twenty-one discrete frequencies between 150 and 3750 Hz. The receiver measures attenuation and noise across each bin, calculating signal-to-noise ratios to determine the maximum sustainable data rate under Claude Shannon’s channel capacity theorem.
A simulated telephone line degrades across the performance. A modem initiates a connection attempt every twenty to thirty seconds; each attempt probes the line, measures channel response, and negotiates down an ordered rate ladder from 24,000 to 300 bit/s. The descent is not scripted: when simulated weather eases, the negotiated rate recovers; when degradation exceeds receiver tolerances, negotiation fails entirely. The on-screen log displays these measurements in step with the playhead.
Each attempt is synthesised and evaluated in full, but sounded only as brief fragments under one second. Fragments are scattered across a temporal window wider than the attempt interval, overlapping successive attempts so their boundaries cannot be distinguished by ear.
The dynamic scale follows lowercase sound practice, in particular Steve Roden’s Forms of Paper (2001, LINE), which built a quiet acoustic environment from contact-microphone recordings of handled book pages. Roden drew on Rainer Maria Rilke’s phrase “inconsiderable things” (inconsiderable Dinge) for material that ordinarily goes unnoticed.
The perspective is that of the telephone itself, echoing Alvin Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire (1977) in allowing the autonomous physical behavior of a wire to dictate the sound. The electrical state of the subscriber loop constitutes the instrument’s sensory register, framing a sequence of failing connections across a storm.