I Called to Tell You About the Clouds
Stephen Voran (NTIA)

Speech was recorded digitally on a computer. Each image was produced by plotting a segment (about one tenth of a second long) of waveform samples (vertical axis) against delayed samples (horizontal axis) of that same waveform using a delay of about one one-thousandth of a second. Axes are not shown.
A digital sound recording of a woman speaking the phrase "Pink clouds floated with the breeze" was divided into 16 segments and each segment was used to produce an image. The left-hand 16 images are associated with the original recording and they show a variety of organic shapes and structures that are analogous to the variety of sounds in the spoken phrase. The right-hand 16 images correspond to the same 16 segments of speech but were extracted from inside the telephone network where electronic processing had significantly distorted the sounds. The main visual consequence of this distortion is the imposition of a rectilinear structure, visible in many of the right-hand 16 images. Yet the essence of each image persists even when its form has been severely warped from the natural to the mechanical, just as the message in a phone call can often be understood even when noises and distortions make the voice nearly unrecognizable.

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