If you hear something, free something

What do we hear when we ride public transportation? Who is speaking to us, and what are we being asked to do?

Artist Chloë Bass debuts her first sound work, If you hear something, free something, a public art commission presented by Creative Time in partnership with MTA Arts & Design. The MTA serves millions of New York City residents daily, spanning every single neighborhood and social boundary. It is where every denomination of New York City meets. A monumental but fleeting gesture, Bass makes use of New York City Transit’s PA system with a series of sonic artworks consisting of 24 poetic announcements that build a practice of everyday care and question the usual purposes of public address.

The sonic artworks—in English, Spanish, Arabic, Bangla, Haitian Kreyòl, and Mandarin—will play intermittently from September 3 to October 5, 2025 in key station mezzanines, reaching hundreds of thousands of riders. ASL translations will be available on Creative Time’s website. Each announcement begins with a custom tone, designed by Bass in collaboration with artist Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, and ends with a chorus of voices, prompting If you hear something, free something.

The soundscape of the city affects its residents’ quality of life; noise plays a huge role in regulating the nervous system for better and for worse. The quality of noise can directly affect people’s willingness to participate in shared experiences and to help strangers. To move beyond courtesy and into connection, Bass plays critically with two well-known campaign slogans: “If You See Something, Say Something” and “Courtesy Counts.” How can we restore our inner emotional life in public space? What are our responsibilities to each other in these shared spaces?

To prepare for If you hear something, free something, Bass assembled a series of focus groups—consisting of a cross section of transit riders (teens, adults, and transit advocates) and MTA workers—to consider together what sounds and stories might call us to somewhere familiar, or bring us to a place of ease. The resulting announcements are voiced by a series of professional performers, as well as by everyday New Yorkers including Bass herself.

If you hear something, free something speaks to the long history of the MTA as an important site of public address, a mechanism for speaking larger state goals into the daily lives of its residents. At the height of the Cold War, emergency broadcast systems were created in order to alert citizens of geopolitical threats. In the wake of 9/11, a series of new campaigns were initiated across New York to encourage heightened awareness of one’s neighbors and surroundings. As we ride, we are asked to say something if we see something, to offer our seats to people who need them more, and to listen for the conductor to share service changes. Whether we are consciously aware of it or not, these messages govern our behavior towards each other.

Bass aims to break growing feelings of fear and distrust, and instead to offer moments of surprise, reflection, levity, and connection. If you hear something, free something hopes to shift our quick responses to moments of stress, to build accountability to each other, and to connect the everyday to the big picture. In a city of millions of people, this work incites kindness between strangers and awareness between neighbors.

Thank you to the vocalists: Gelsey Bell, Jean Ann Douglass, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Rena Anakwe, Abdelrazek Abdelhamid, Calogero Gambino, Farah Mehreen Ahmad, Natalia Mendez, Olive Zwicky, Samantha Cortez, Vladimir Francois, Wilson Zhang, and ASL actors Zavier Sabió and Treshelle Edmond.

• Manhattan: Fulton St   , 14 St-Union Sq    , 42 St-Bryant Pk/5 Av  , Grand Central-42 St  , 163 St-Amsterdam Av   

• Queens: Court Sq   , 74 St-Broadway  , Mets-Willets Point  
• Brooklyn: Clinton-Washington Avs  , Fort Hamilton Pkwy   , York St  , Atlantic Av-Barclays Ctr     
• Bronx: 167 St   , Westchester Sq-E Tremont Av  

A full written version of the script, translated from English into translation of the script into Arabic, Bangla, Mandarin, Haitian Kreyòl and Spanish is available by accessing Creative Time's website. 

You can also watch all 24 announcements in ASL by clicking here. 

Chloë Bass is a multiform conceptual artist working in performance, conversation, situation, publication, and installation. Bass has been exhibited and published at major institutions around the world, including recent solo exhibits at Buffalo AKG Art Museum, California African American Museum at A+P, Skirball Cultural Center, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven. Recently, MTA Arts & Deign unveiled Chloë Bass’s permanent public artwork, Personal Choice #5, 2023, in the Lorimer St   train subway station. The work invites riders to reflect on shared lived experience, connection, and physical and emotional proximity in New York City. The work invites riders to reflect on shared lived experience, connection, and physical and emotional proximity in New York City.

Her work uses daily life as a site of deep research to address scales of intimacy, where patterns hold and break as group sizes expand. She began her work with a focus on the individual, The Bureau of Self-Recognition (2011–2013), followed by an eight chapter work exploring one-on-one social interaction, The Book of Everyday Instruction (2015–2017). Bass recently concluded an investigation at the scale of the immediate family, Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place (2018–2024). She is currently expanding her study of groups with Since feeling is first (2024–ongoing), a series of works examining intimacy at the scale of the courtroom and the law. She will continue to scale up gradually until she’s working at the scale of the metropolis.

Since 1974, Creative Time has commissioned and presented over 350 ambitious public art projects in partnership with thousands of artists and organizations throughout New York City, across the country, around the world—and even in outer space. Creative Time’s work is guided by three core values: art matters, artists’ voices are important in shaping society, and public spaces are places for creative and free expression.

Creative Time is acclaimed for the innovative and meaningful projects it has commissioned, from Tribute in Light (2002), the twin beacons of light that illuminated lower Manhattan six months after 9/11, to Kara Walker’s powerful sugar-sphinx at the Domino Sugar Factory (2014), and Pedro Reyes’s Doomocracy (2016), a theatrical haunted house of political nightmares at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, and so much more. Though based in New York City, the organization touches millions, both nationally and internationally, through initiatives like the Creative Time Summit, which has been presented in a variety of locations including Venice, Stockholm, Washington, D.C., and Miami. Creative Time is committed to presenting important art for our times and engaging broad audiences that transcend geographic, racial, and socioeconomic barriers.