New Yorkers passing through the subways starting Wednesday may notice something unfamiliar in the air: a voice that isn’t telling them when the next train arrives, but is instead nudging them to feel something.
A new audio artwork by conceptual artist and lifelong New Yorker Chloë Bass — titled “if you hear something, free something” — will take over the public address systems in 14 subway stations citywide, including Grand Central, Union Square, Atlantic–Barclays and Court Square.
The project represents the first time the MTA has opened its broadcast infrastructure to an artist-led commission. This one is a collaboration between the nonprofit public arts organization Creative Time and MTA Arts & Design, the agency’s in-house arts agency.
Bass said the work, which is made up of 24 poetic announcements delivered in six languages, is meant to gently interrupt daily life.
“These announcements ask you to consider the space around you, the people around you, and your own emotional state a little bit differently,” she said. “It’s my hope that this project actually gives people back a little bit of their interior life in public space.”
The project runs through Oct. 5 and coincides with MTA Arts & Design’s 40th anniversary. The stations were selected both for their sound systems and layouts, with the project prioritizing spaces where riders have room to listen, walk and maybe reflect.
Most of the announcements are around 30 seconds long. Some are voiced by professional actors, and others by everyday New Yorkers whom Bass recruited through a grassroots casting process. Some announcements sound like poetry, while some sound like overhearing a conversation. Some are personal stories.
Bass said participants speaking Spanish, Arabic, Bangla, Haitian Creole and Mandarin Chinese all had the opportunity to adapt the translations to the nuances of their own language. She described herself as a “super New Yorker” whose family has been in the city for four generations on her father’s side, and whose mother emigrated from Trinidad.
“My family’s older than the subway,” Bass said. “The New York City subway is 1904. There are definitely people in my family who were born in New York in the late 1860s.”
The idea for the piece came out of a longstanding dream Bass said she shared with Creative Time. The organization approached her in 2023 about a collaboration that would involve taking over the MTA’s public announcement system.
To her surprise, no one said no — though the process involved years of negotiations between the arts, communications and technical departments of the MTA, she said. Bass added that she spent a day in the MTA’s audio system control room, where the agency tests announcements on every type of speaker used in the system.
“No one has ever done this before, so that has been a large process of education for all of us, including for the MTA itself,” she said.
To launch the piece, Bass is staging a live performance at Fulton Center on Wednesday, with 10 performers scattered throughout the station’s atrium. It’s the only time the full sequence of announcements will be presented in order. The work will then live in fragments, driving in and out of the daily commute.
“For the people who catch it, it’ll feel, hopefully, like a secret that they’re holding,” Bass said.