One of the first things I notice when I travel to a new city is the announcements on the public transit system, particularly the chimes and bells that signal doors are closing.
Apparently I’m not the only person who’s interested in “doors closing announcements” as I found compilations galore that have racked up millions of views (???) down a weird YouTube rabbit hole.
Now that I’m not traveling anywhere in the near future, it was fun to watch these videos from different cities and listen to the subway chimes, something mundane to those who live there but can be surprising for those who’ve never been.
I could blame the quarantine for this useless “study” I did but I admit I’ve thought about this for quite a few years now… so here are the cities of the chimes I “analyzed,” a completely unscientific sample mostly based on what was available in YouTube clips. And here is a useless map I decided to make of those cities, do not @ me.
I decided to group the chimes by the chord interval of the notes in sequence (my music theory terminology might be a bit dusty), but even if you don’t have any grasp of music theory, you can hear the similarities within each group. Some patterns (and lack thereof) I noticed:
- Most of the intervals go down, aka from a higher note to a lower note. A stretch of imagination could see this as “offboarding”/going off the train? Who knows.
- All the chords are major chords. People want to be happy when commuting, I guess.
- There’s a pretty even split between male and female voices in the announcements, which was a bit surprising.
- There wasn’t a real geographic trend I noticed, except for the Canadian cities.
Of course, cities often times have more than one type of transit system, but I just included one from each. Here they are grouped by types of chord intervals:
Not really an interval, these chimes are single notes in various rhythmic patterns. Some of them can be quite abrasive, but they do the job of being an alert.
London Underground: “this train is about to depart, please mind the doors,” — female voice.
Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority: “please stand clear, the doors are closing”— male voice.
Mass Transit Railway (Hong Kong): “please stand back from the train doors”— female voice.
U-Bahn (Berlin): “[in German] Stay back” — male voice. (thanks to a helpful tweeter for the translation)
Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (Boston)
Paris Métro
Major thirds are very pleasant, and going down to the tonic feels conclusive.
Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (D.C.): “step back, doors closing” — female voice.
Metropolitan Transportation Authority (New York): “stand clear of the closing doors please”— male voice.
New Jersey Transit
Singapore’s Mass Rapid Transit: “doors are closing” —female voice.
A perfect fourth down feels less conclusive and a bit more awkward than a major third. The exception is the Denver Light Rail, the only interval that goes up in this group (if you think about the notes as a progression and not a chord, this could be instead the dominant going back to the tonic, a very conclusive-feeling resolution.)
Chicago Transit Authority El: “doors closing”— male voice.
Tokyo Metro (check out that syncopation!)
RTD Light Rail (Denver): “stand clear, the doors are closing”— female voice.
An arpeggio is a broken chord where the notes of a chord are played in sequence in one direction. I noticed that all the Canadian cities I looked at had extremely pleasant-sounding arpeggios.
Toronto Transit Commission Subway: “please stand clear of the doors” — female voice.
TransLink SkyTrain (Vancouver)
Montréal Metro
For further thoughts… I’d be interested to see what other sounds and chimes on the same trains sound like. Some systems have chimes when the train is leaving the station, when next stops are announced, etc. Also, a wider survey of cities, especially on continents I didn’t cover, would be fun to add to the analysis.
[Correction: An earlier version of this post mislabeled Singapore’s Mass Rapid Transit. Text and graphics are updated.]
