--- title: "BirdCalls has spent ten years proving the value of a phone that barely does anything" locale: "en" url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/birdcalls-payphone-en" markdown_url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/birdcalls-payphone-en.md" category: "creative" tags: ["design", "interaction", "Arduino", "sound", "nature"] published_at: "2026-08-19T08:25:00.000Z" author: "Inès Vidal" translation: "https://irz.fr/fr/articles/birdcalls-payphone-fr.md" --- # BirdCalls has spent ten years proving the value of a phone that barely does anything Since 2016, an obsolete payphone in Takoma Park has played local bird calls. Its longevity says more about the design than its technical specifications do. In Takoma Park, Maryland, a yellow payphone has spent the years since 2016 doing far less than a smartphone: pick up the handset, press a number and the phone plays the call of a local bird.[1](https://blog.arduino.cc/2026/07/22/birdcalls-how-an-old-payphone-became-a-decade-long-lesson-in-what-technology-is-for/)[3](https://news.virginia.edu/content/he-made-phone-plays-birdsong-2016-why-it-just-now-catching-eyes) There is no account, home screen or ornithological social network, and even the phone itself had already lived one life before becoming BirdCalls. David Schulman's sound-art project is easy to present as a charming hack, yet its more interesting quality emerges from an unglamorous fact: **it is still there almost a decade later**.[1](https://blog.arduino.cc/2026/07/22/birdcalls-how-an-old-payphone-became-a-decade-long-lesson-in-what-technology-is-for/) Longevity changes the question because an Arduino triggering an audio file from a keypad is no longer the interesting technical achievement. After almost ten years, it is more useful to ask why children, passers-by and people waiting for a bus still pick up a device with such an absurdly narrow function. ## The phone already explains how to use it BirdCalls inherits an interface that people learned long before the project existed. The handset suggests lifting it and the keypad suggests that numbers trigger something, while bringing the receiver to an ear puts the sound in the correct place and the public enclosure signals that strangers are allowed to touch it. Schulman therefore avoids teaching a new gesture vocabulary and instead repurposes one that is becoming obsolete while remaining broadly recognisable. The original installation came from Takoma Park asking for ideas to reuse a technologically obsolete payphone.[1](https://blog.arduino.cc/2026/07/22/birdcalls-how-an-old-payphone-became-a-decade-long-lesson-in-what-technology-is-for/)[3](https://news.virginia.edu/content/he-made-phone-plays-birdsong-2016-why-it-just-now-catching-eyes) Schulman combined that object with field recordings held by Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library, connecting a familiar piece of street infrastructure with species living around the city. Locality is important because the phone plays species that users may encounter in the same environment after hanging up, rather than serving as a generic soundboard disconnected from its site. ## The hardware has very few reasons to age badly Recent versions use Arduino Uno or Nano boards, with audio files and bird information stored locally on an SD card, so the device needs no cloud service, mobile app or Wi-Fi connection to perform its basic function.[1](https://blog.arduino.cc/2026/07/22/birdcalls-how-an-old-payphone-became-a-decade-long-lesson-in-what-technology-is-for/) The original phone was wired in 2016 with help from Branden Hall, while in 2024 Ryn Slack rewrote the code for later installations and added features including randomised playback.[1](https://blog.arduino.cc/2026/07/22/birdcalls-how-an-old-payphone-became-a-decade-long-lesson-in-what-technology-is-for/) > Illustration: Branden Hall rewiring the original BirdCalls payphone. The first BirdCalls reused the existing payphone by rewiring it rather than inventing a new physical interface. Credit: [Arduino Blog](https://blog.arduino.cc/2026/07/22/birdcalls-how-an-old-payphone-became-a-decade-long-lesson-in-what-technology-is-for/). That evolution shows maintenance without feature inflation: the second generation improves an interaction that was already understood instead of expanding BirdCalls into another general-purpose platform. Simplicity also removes several failure surfaces because the system mainly needs power, storage, a controller, keypad sensing and audio output; no subscription has to be renewed for button four to keep producing a woodpecker call. To be sure, simplicity alone guarantees nothing about a ten-year life because weather, power supplies, buttons and speakers still age. BirdCalls does, however, avoid several modern sources of obsolescence by design: APIs, authentication systems, incompatible mobile operating systems and abandoned servers. ## Los Angeles changes the birds, not the interface The project now exists elsewhere. At The Willows Community School in Culver City, another BirdCalls phone presents ten local species such as Allen's hummingbird, red-tailed hawk, acorn woodpecker and great horned owl; the school describes it both as a sensory experience and an extension of science education.[2](https://www.thewillows.org/wisdom-of-the-willows/~board/blog-articles/post/listening-to-nature-the-bird-calls-phone-at-the-willows) That transfer reveals a quiet strength: the project has a **stable format with locally variable content**. Moving BirdCalls to another city therefore leaves the interaction mostly intact, while the editorial work becomes choosing birds, recordings and information that belong to that place. Arduino also says another installation is planned for Wake Forest Elementary School in autumn 2026, another sign that the project is spreading more like a cultural recipe than an electronics product.[1](https://blog.arduino.cc/2026/07/22/birdcalls-how-an-old-payphone-became-a-decade-long-lesson-in-what-technology-is-for/) ## Technology can be measured by the ritual it creates Technical specifications tend to reward additional capabilities, which makes a device with more sensors, stored information and connections look automatically more advanced. By contrast, BirdCalls has spent most of its life doing very little. BirdCalls runs in the other direction, removing conversation, the telephone network and payment while reducing the keypad to a set of audio doors; in exchange, it preserves one very clear social gesture: **stop in a public place for a few seconds and listen**. That may be why the project has aged well. Rather than competing with the phone already in a passer-by's pocket, it creates a situation that the pocket computer does not naturally produce: a shared object fixed to one location whose content is specifically about that location. BirdCalls' achievement is therefore larger than technical survival, since a protected microcontroller can run for much longer than ten years. In the long term, what matters is that the gesture still has a reason to exist, even though **the payphone itself became obsolete while the interaction did not**. ## References 1. [Arduino, BirdCalls: how an old payphone became a decade-long lesson in what technology is for](https://blog.arduino.cc/2026/07/22/birdcalls-how-an-old-payphone-became-a-decade-long-lesson-in-what-technology-is-for/) 2. [The Willows Community School, Listening to Nature: The Bird Calls Phone](https://www.thewillows.org/wisdom-of-the-willows/~board/blog-articles/post/listening-to-nature-the-bird-calls-phone-at-the-willows) 3. [University of Virginia, He Made a Phone That Plays Birdsong in 2016](https://news.virginia.edu/content/he-made-phone-plays-birdsong-2016-why-it-just-now-catching-eyes)