Théo Z. V. Champion's Whispering Wires Turn an Old Phone Into a Raspberry Pi-Powered Poet
"What if these silent wires could whisper again," the artist mused — before packing 3,000 spoken-word poems into a vintage telephone.
Maker Théo Z. V. Champion, also known as "Rootkid," has turned a classic push-button telephone into a work of art — by replacing its innards with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer and programming it to read poetry.
"A few weeks ago I visited a vintage market in London, and there was this phone," Champion explains. "Like, [a] vintage, rotary-type phone. Even though it was clearly disconnected I noticed people kept lifting its handset to their ears, on instinct. Of course [they were] met with silence, but what if these silent wires could whisper again? What if each lift of the handset delivered a voice, a fragment of life, an advice, a hardship… words from a poet."
Dubbed Whispering Wires, Champion's art piece is based on a Socotel (Société des Constructeurs de Téléphone) 63 in push-button, rather than rotary pulse-dialing, form. Rather than connecting to a plain old telephone line, as originally intended, the device is treated to an upgrade: a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board computer lives inside the housing, connecting to a Wi-Fi network to stream audio over the internet.
"I needed a huge source of narrated poems in audio format," Champion notes of said audio. "I looked around and stumbled upon the Poetry Foundation website. It has a huge library of poems, and some of them include audio narrated by the author - so I poked around the website code and was quickly able to find an open access to their database, from which I could curry poems directly."
To make the experience more seamless, Champion turned to a couple of large language models (LLMs): Whisper, which transcribes the audio with word-level timing, and OpenAI's GPT-4o-mini, which takes that transcription and attempts to identify where the actual poem — rather than introductory preamble — begins and ends. The audio is then cut to only the poem section, delivering over 3,000 spoken-word pieces with no preamble.
"I wanted the audio to sound like old phones," Champion adds, "so I did some research and found that phones back then typically used a frequency band range of 300 to 3,400Hz and a sampling frequency of 8kHz, so I wrote some code to apply this filter to the audio before playing."
The project is documented in full in the video embedded above and on Champion's YouTube channel.