Originally Posted by
BenA
"One dollar ninety point four two."
Seriously, what is the deal with the song on the Diamond Desk hold muzak loop that has this as a random vocal? It doesn't even make any sense!
(I know I've complained about this before, but it still bugs me...)
Googling for it as a complete phrase turned up:
http://oro.open.ac.uk/57447/1/359792.pdf
which is a 339 (!) page PDF of a 1994 PhD thesis entitled "OPTOPHONE DESIGN: OPTICAL-TO-AUDITORY VISION SUBSTITUTION FOR THE BLIND" and buried on pages 133-134 of the PDF (pages 132-133 in the original source):
Several short passages of speech and music have been analysed with a view to deriving the statistics of real sounds. Figure 6.16 shows the PR of an extract from a financial bulletin read by an American lady saying "[The] pound benefitted from the dollar's weakness and rose to the giddy height of one dollar ninety point four two, that's the highest for f[our years, before dropping
back]".
This still doesn't explain how or why that sample made it into the hold music loop but at least could explain what the fragment means
