Chloë Bass: If you hear something, free something: Creative Time, MTA Arts & Design

Chloë Bass's public art project If you hear something, free something, commisioned by Creative Time in partnership with MTA Arts & Design, New York, NY. 

The institution's press release follows:

"What we hear changes how we feel.
How we feel changes what we do.
And what we do changes the world
around us, even if just for a moment.

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.
Chloë Bass is a multiform artist whose practice includes performance, conversation, situation, publication, and installation. 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. For over fifty years, Creative Time has commissioned and presented ambitious public art projects with thousands of artists 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. If you hear something, free something marks the first innovative artist project on the MTA Broadcast System.