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| Re: Perhaps SHE is the voice of the F train?! (1169717) | |||
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Re: Perhaps SHE is the voice of the F train?! |
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Posted by G1Ravage on Tue Jul 31 05:08:20 2012, in response to Re: Perhaps SHE is the voice of the F train?!, posted by 600vdc on Tue Jul 31 01:46:20 2012. Mr. 600vdc, you've just provided more information than we probably had ever hoped to receive. Thank you so much.I'm a Train Operator for the New York City Subway, with a side interest in radio and voice acting, so I always enjoy playing "guess the voice". Here's where we stand right now.... For years, we've known this much: Melissa Kleiner: (5) (removed in a later update) Jessica Ettinger: (4)(5)(6) (moved out west, no longer records) Dianne Thompson: (1)(2)(3)(9) (status unknown; possibly still recording?) Catherine Cowdery: (B)(D)(E)(G)(J)(L)(M)(N)(Q)(R)(V)(W)(Z) (had been recording newer transfer updates for a while, but has since disappeared; status unknown) Charlie Pellett: Many miscellaneous announcements. Always available. I also suspect that Cowdery recorded the (7) and 42nd Street (S) Shuttle, but I can't be 100% sure. I once heard another name get thrown out there, but I forgot who it was. Originally on the R-142 cars, Pellett provided all of the transfer announcements, using what I presume to be a master file of him saying every letter and number, and then Transit (or a third party) editing together what they needed at the time (as our service is constantly evolving). In a later update around 2002/2003 or so, Ettinger and Thompson came in and recorded a bunch of transfer announcements for their respective lines. These new transfers were used mainly to reflect new rush hour service patterns, while many of the Pellett transfers remained. However, with Ettinger (and possibly Thompson) out of the picture, Transit has gone back to splicing together Pellett transfers these days when needed. With the R-160 cars, however, Cowdery recorded her own transfers for each station, and interestingly enough, even apparently recorded the *same station name* multiple times for different lines, rather than Transit reusing just one file. When updates were needed, Cowdery rerecorded transfers for a while, but hasn't lately. The big question we've been pondering for a long while now is who is voicing the (A)(C)(F), Franklin Avenue (S) Shuttle, and Rockaway Park (S) Shuttle trains on the R-160 cars. For the longest time we had assumed it was Thompson. It sounded a *bit* like her, and we had once read an interview where she admitted she voiced the (1)(2)(3) and (9), and said she someday hoped to voice the (A), which I think was her home line at the time. But then a few months ago, someone discovered a sound byte of Kathleen Campion reading some news, and holy moly, she sounded like that voice from the R-160! This mystery voice, much like Cowdery, recorded transfers for her respective lines, but Transit in recent years has stopped caring about any sort of voice consistency on the announcements, and has begun mixing together Cowdery and mystery-voice into the same sentence at times. "Mystery-voice" has solely been recording the latest transfers and new station names for at least the past year or so, although Pellett has also recently recorded newer transfer announcements, where splicing wasn't enough. I tried to find information on Kathleen Campion. All I could really find was a Bloomberg Businessweek page, mentioning that Campion was Executive Vice President of Bloomberg L.P. Sounds like a really high-up position to still be recording subway announcements, unless she personally enjoys doing them. Anyway, I turned this into an essay, didn't I? If there's anything else you can tell us about your time involved with our subways, that would be wonderful. There are many railfans out there who create high-quality recordings of announcements for scrap-booking, or for use in train simulation games, and they post them on YouTube. I'm sure they could link to a few if you wanted to hear how our latest R-160 announcements were coming along (and whether we're hearing Thompson or Campion). In fact, starting around 3:16 into this video are some very old cell-phone recordings of the (7) line announcements, which have not yet been used in passenger service (new trains haven't yet arrived on the (7) line). Any idea who this is? |
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