If you’ve ever been on a French train you know this woman — or at least her voice
Her name is Simone Hérault, a blue-eyed fifty-something. She announces the arrivals, departures and instructions on all railway stations in France. Tough job? Not really. One day, she turned up in a studio, and recorded all the hours and minutes of the day, train numbers, and station names, together with some short stock phrases. A computer does the rest by joining the bits together into sentences like “Train 1234 from Marseilles will arrive at this station in 2 minutes on quay B“. Simone has been doing this for 25 years, and has come back several times to record supplemental tidbits.
Since 2004, all her messages are preceded by a four-tone jingle, composed by instrumentalist Michaël Boumendil. His tune even made it to a Kraftwerk-like piece of music, here shown as a muscial backdrop for a short video:
Her name is Simone Hérault, a blue-eyed fifty-something. She announces the arrivals, departures and instructions on all railway stations in France. Tough job? Not really. One day, she turned up in a studio, and recorded all the hours and minutes of the day, train numbers, and station names, together with some short stock phrases. A computer does the rest by joining the bits together into sentences like “Train 1234 from Marseilles will arrive at this station in 2 minutes on quay B“. Simone has been doing this for 25 years, and has come back several times to record supplemental tidbits.
Great video! There’s also a bit of Air in there.