This is also a throwback, a sound that mimics the vibrations of a mechanical part that is no longer in use on any of the system’s trains. In Paris, a simple “A” note plays as the doors shut. (The Habs refer to the Montreal Canadiens of the National Hockey League.) “Without these three notes, Montreal and its metro would not be the same.” (Many mistake the sound for the opening notes of Fanfare for the Common Man, a piece by composer Aaron Copland, but this is a coincidence, Clairoux added.) “Three simple notes - ‘ doo-doo-doo’ - that have become synonymous to Montreal, as much as smoked meat (sorry, New York!) and the Habs in hockey,” Clairoux wrote in an email. So executives added a synthetic “doo-doo-doo.” When the transit authority wanted to add a door-closing chime in 2005, they tested various sounds, though none was as popular as a chime that mimicked this mechanical sound. It made a sound as the trains pulled out of the station: “ doo-doo-doo.” “Metro cars act as a sounding board, and amplify the melody,” said Benoit Clairoux, a historian of Montreal’s transit system. In Montreal, where the first metro trains were put in service in 1966, there was an electronic circuit called a current chopper, which worked to slow down the electronic frequency applied to the motor. But some originally emerged from mechanical processes in older trains. Most chimes these days are computer generated, played automatically as part of the door-closing process.
“So looking for different transit chimes can almost be a form of collecting.” “A lot of train enthusiasts are also collectors,” said Adam Rose, an audio designer who works on train simulations for Dovetail Games, and who consequently spends a good part of his day listening to transit chimes. He has made many more videos since this past year, he’s noticed that there’s been a spike in viewership, perhaps because of nostalgia for train riding during global lockdowns. He was shocked when one door-closing montage got more than two million views. For Green, recording videos of door closings started as a way to document his travel for himself, but he eventually compiled some videos on YouTube.
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