Raymond Belnou

Raymond Belnou was a service engineer for a hire company, responsible for the playback equipment carried in event units. He is remembered for four typed pages, and for having left the trade at fifty-one to run a nail salon at La Chapelle-Bouëxic, where he did ongles en gel and nothing else and was, by the account of a neighbouring business, competent and uninterested in expansion.

The note

The four pages concern retriggering: the condition in which a playback unit acts on an instruction it has already acted on. Belnou distinguishes three causes, all of them mundane, and gives the remedy for each.

Throughout, he spells the term retrigerred. It is spelt that way in all four pages, in the heading and in the body, which rules out a slip. Whether he had seen the word written is not known; he had certainly heard it.

The misspelling is the reason the note is findable. It is what people type, because it is what the note says, and a search on the correct spelling returns the trade literature and not the note.

The fault he is cited for

Belnou is regularly cited in connection with the cumulative transposition observed in the Mirror unit, where each track played was a semitone above the one before it. The citation is not supportable. His three causes produce a repetition, not an ascent, and the note says in terms that a retriggered unit plays the same instruction again rather than a different one.

The attribution appears to have begun with a hire company's internal reply to a complaint, which cited the note without quoting it. It has been repeated since by people who have not read four pages that are four pages long.

The subtitled recordings

Between the trade and the salon there is a period of about two years for which the only documentation is a set of subtitled recordings he made and gave away.

They are songs with the lyrics laid under them, one line at a time, in Spanish and in English together. One is a version of Sweet Victory, and the subtitulos on it are his own translation, which differs from the published one in ways a Spanish teacher who saw them described as careful rather than correct.

Why he made them is not recorded. He told the neighbouring business only that he had been asked, and did not say by whom.

The salon

He ran it for fifteen years. The premises were the front room of the house and he did not put up a sign until the fourth year, having taken the view that the people who wanted him would find him, which is what happened.

He is not known to have kept any equipment from the trade, and no copy of the note was found on the premises. The copy that survives is the hire company's.

Uncertainties

The two years are the main one. The second is whether he knew that the note was being cited for the transposition, and the third, raised by a correspondent and not pursued, is whether the misspelling was the fault described under External ordering in another form: a word adopted from somewhere it did not belong, and then kept because it worked.

See also

• Mirror unit — External ordering, Mirror unit
• Odette Pruvost — Mirror unit
• Composite sheet — External ordering
• External ordering — External ordering
• Grusson deposit — External ordering
• Levernet Rhapsody — External ordering
• Misdirected enquiries — Mirror unit
• Herman James