Ye Olde Telephone

Ye Olde Telephone is a project we have now been working on for many years, and has been through multiple complete-overhaul iterations to serve various larger projects over that time. It started as the Santa Phone on Sturt Street in 2023, and has since gone through multiple rebuilds to currently become a recurring Heritage Festival interactive art installation that gets major updates every year.

v1 - Santa Phone on Sturt St

It began as a collaboration with the City of Ballarat, initially developed as a “Santa Phone” installation for the Sturt Street Christmas decorations. The project featured a restored outdoor telephone box containing a period telephone, retrofitted with a Raspberry Pi that allowed members of the public to dial in and listen to recorded messages from Santa. This installation went well and was very popular but taught us a lot about what happens when projects get physically interacted with by the public... eg it got trashed.

Building on the success of this installation, the project evolved into Ye Olde Telephone: an original 1940s rotary telephone integrated with custom electronics and software. The rotary dial was reverse-engineered to provide digital to software running on the Raspberry Pi. We built a plinth and heavy duty base to hold the phone up and designed/3D-printed replacement parts such as the speaker cover and dialler base, making everything more durable but most importantly replaceable.

v2 - Ballarat Heritage Festival 2023 and 2024

With further funding from the City of Ballarat, the system was expanded into an interactive art installation for the Ballarat Heritage Festival in 2023 (and the same thing deployed in 2024). We had an Arduino connected to the dialler so that dialling specific numbers would trigger the playing of audio recordings into the speaker in the ear-piece.

Visitors could dial one of the pre-programmed numbers and audio recordings commissoned by local voice actors would then tell historically themed stories.

This was a basic version of our plans for the phone that was mostly focussed on just getting the core electronics functioning, as integrating new technology with 100 year old mechanical constructs is not always straight forward. This was a good demonstration of the idea though, and it worked really well with lots of positive feedback.

v3 - Ballarat Heritage Festival 2026

In 2026 we were commissioned to build a new version of the telephone for the Ballarat Heritage Festival, and it was reborn again.

We had over 1,000 people use the phone at the Heritage Festival, with a total listen-time of almost 6 hours of people listening to stories throughout the weekend.

The idea this time was to use cutting-edge technology to keep stories from the past alive. We started by building an automated research-and-collate system that trawled hundreds of sources to find facts from the past that were all cited and verified, letting us build a treasure trove of interesting facts and stories from local history that can be used in this iteration and future projects.

We then built a stack of systems to process all this information and start generating what we need, starting with software that generates characters and builds profiles based on those characters, world-building the characters with relevant traits and descriptions. These character profiles are then used to generate realistic-sounding conversation scripts between pairs/groups of characters that tell the facts and stories in conversational ways, with styles that suit the individual characters. You might get a miner calling his wife to explain an event that happened, or some locals chatting about current events in that period. This then lets us use those character profiles and story scripts to generate audio samples of the voices using a neural-network based voice generator trained on huge amounts of real recorded speech. Lastly, every single piece of output gets human-verified by us before being approved and added to the project.

We also had to redevelop the dialling system and modify it so that it now allows proper dialling of all numbers into an ESP32 which sends the inputs to the Raspberry Pi for processing and triggering of the correct audio samples. The scripts on the Pi also need to handle things like wrong-numbers and mis-dials, either rounding the dialled number to the nearest year that has a story or giving an appropriate error recording from our Operator character.

All up this ended up being a massive but fascinating iteration of the project to build, and while it's far from perfect it does get us more excited than ever about the potential of both this project and things we can make using all the systems/software we created to build this project. Local history is always interesting, especially in a place like Ballarat, and finding creative ways to tell that history using new technologies is really fun.

Interested in building a project like this? Contact or visit the Ballarat Hackerspace for a chat, whether it's just advice on your own build or us building something for you.