He's the voice of the Chicago Transit Authority, known to many simply as "CTA Guy." Since his articulate automated messages began running four years ago on the trains and last year on the buses, he has become such a ubiquitous part of daily life in Chicago that the Second City comedy troupe put a recording of him in their latest show. For all his local fame, however, CTA Guy's identity remains a closely guarded secret. Speculations about him ran regularly in the Chicago Reader ("Likes to wear pastel shirts...lives in the city and owns a condo...loves jazz... likes red wine") until the Chicago Tribune exposed him anonymously as a family guy and professional voice-over actor from Milwaukee.
More and more transit systems are installing automated-voice systems on their buses, subways and light-rail cars, in part to make it easier for blind passengers to navigate. The new voices, in all their consistent clarity, have become the mechanized fairies of the everyday commute, pleasantly reassuring to some riders while painfully annoying to others. Their necessary repetition inevitably means that passengers internalize all the subtle tones and inflections. It would be difficult to find a New Yorker on one of the city's shiny new subway cars who can't mimic the amiable female voice that says, "This is a Bronx-bound six train," followed by the authoritative male who tells riders to "Stand clear of the closing doors, please!"
It is precisely because these lines burn quickly into the civic identity that transit systems choose their voices carefully. The two voices of New York's subway are clear-throated anchors for Bloomberg radio. (They got the gig before their boss became mayor.) In the Windy City, CTA Guy had to beat out more than a dozen other professional voice-over actors for both the El job and the bus job. "You have to be very, very skillful to be able to modulate your voice so as to not sound monotonous," says Karen Stavens, CTA Guy's agent. "He has a wonderful talent for doing that."
There are other issues for transit officials to consider. Take accents. Should the voice of Boston's buses have a wicked New England accent? Transit officials there resisted the urge, although they did have to coach their voice-over person on a few local pronunciations. Worcester is pronounced "Wooster," for example. "In any market, whether the South, the Northeast or the West Coast, cities typically try to pick a neutral-sounding voice," says Edward Brandis, a project manager for Clever Devices, a vendor whose voice systems run on bus systems around the country.
There is also some gender politics involved. An article in the New York Observer, noting that the female subway voice in New York tells the stops while the male voice issues warnings, questioned whether transit officials had "bought into some pop theory that people take commandments ('Stand clear!') more seriously if delivered by a man." For his part, Brandis says the bus systems he works with tend to prefer female voices over male. "We've heard the criticism that male voices sound too militaristic, and that female voices are more soothing," Brandis says.
Houston decided to go with a female voice for the automated system on its buses, due to roll out next year. But it's not a real voice that will be calling out the stops. It's computer-generated, using a high- tech text-to-speech conversion program. Rather than paying an actor to methodically record the names of every intersection in the city, someone will instead type them all into a database. "It will sound like a normal person speaking," insists Mike Burns, who is managing the project for Houston's Metro. "You won't be able to tell that from a human being."
