Voice Of The Vassa

About This Album

Voice Of The Vassa is a tribute to the unmistakable robotic voice that rode the Plane Train — the automated people mover — at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), known for decades as Hartsfield Atlanta International Airport. From the early 1980s until 1996, that computerized announcer guided tens of millions of travelers between concourses, and this is the story of the engineers who built it and the voice itself: the VASSA.

In 1977 George Wilson worked as a Senior Electronics Tech in the Westinghouse Transportation Division lab. One day a young lady engineering graduate of Georgia Tech walked into the lab and handed George a digital recording and playback PC board and chip set. The two discussed using it to replace the eight-track tape drives that were currently in use on the Airport People Mover systems. The tape drives being used on the cars had problems and wore out quickly from constant use, with fluttering, speed variance, and other audio inconsistencies.

Digital speech recording and playback was very new in 1977 and in fact, its use may have been the first mass application in industry. Two days later, they had it packaged into a 19” rack mounted prototype with the board and a power supply. It was a one-to-one plug 'n' play drop-in for the old tape drives.

The device didn’t generate the voice synthetically, but rather the words were spoken into a microphone and recorded. The recordings were then changed to digital signals to allow modification to create the robotic sound that has become so familiar. It was essentially a vocoder and became known as the VASSA: Vehicle Automated Solid State Audio. Any references to the “HAL” (from 2001: A Space Odyssey) or “Cylon” (from Battlestar Galactica) voice is incorrect.

Soon, the engineering graduate was headed back to Atlanta, taking the VASSA with her to install it on a car to see how people liked it. Since the unit was designed to be a one-to-one replacement for the tape drive that currently existed on the mass transit cars, it was an easy switch. They didn't see any harm in trying it out, so they just did it!

Shortly thereafter, the Marketing Department at Westinghouse got a call, with a request to replace all the tape drive annunciator systems in the cars with the exciting new digital voice system. The managers had no clue what the requester was talking about, but eventually found out what George and the young engineer had done. They were called to a meeting with the company marketing and engineering managers, who demanded information on this new project. They were not happy at all that they had installed a product on the customer site without approvals and prior knowledge. George thought they might get fired that day, but the company recognized the ingenuity and problem-solving achievement the two of them had just provided, so they let them go with just a stern warning, "Not to ever place any equipment on a customer site without prior knowledge and approval". However, a year later the company had orders to replace all tape drives on their systems with the new digital VASSA.

The VASSA made the national news, and a year later, at an all-employee company meeting, it was announced that the VASSA was a big success for the company for that year. One thing was forgotten, however: they never thanked George or the young engineer! The voice was heard by tens of millions of people, and used on all Atlanta airport trains until 1996, when the messaging was replaced with a more human voice in preparation for the Atlanta Olympics.

15 years later, George was walking to his car, leaving work one day. He glanced at a garbage dumpster and saw the original VASSA unit they had built sitting on top of the pile! Getting permission (this time), he was given the unit, and took it home. The classic VASSA unit is still in George’s possession to this day!

George Wilson is a Retired Electrical Engineer, Christian musician, and a private and RC pilot. Andrew works for Delta Air Lines and had discussed the voice with nostalgic coworkers and friends for many years. George and Andrew met in 2020 after Andrew commented on a YouTube video that featured a recording of the robotic voice. George responded to Andrew’s comment, and the two struck up a friendship, resulting in this musical collaboration. George was delighted to learn that there were still people who remembered and loved the voice!

This music is a tribute to the VASSA, and to George and the young engineer, from all of us who fondly remember that cool robotic voice on the Atlanta airport trains, and the excitement for travel the voice generated in so many. And don't forget: It's not HAL and it's not a CYLON......It's the VASSA!

As for credit for his efforts, George figures that God knows and, in the end, that's all that really counts.

About George Wilson

George grew up in a poor coal-mining family, and the thing that changed his life showed up when his dad came home in 1963 with a $500 Fender Jaguar. George taught himself to play it, and a year later he had a band. He played out for six years and made a living at it, which is no small thing for a kid from a coal town. He also took his high school sweetheart to the prom, and she became his wife. They have two grown kids.

Music was only ever one of the things George got good at. He earned his pilot's license back in the 1970s, and he owned and operated a video production company, keeping the studio running for years. He's also an RC pilot, and not in a casual way — he has 230 radio-controlled planes. That number is not a typo.

The engineering side of his life ran alongside all of that. The team George worked on was always chasing something new, and their product was automated airport people movers and mass transit systems. They built the BART system in the San Francisco area and systems all over the country, but the airport installations were really the mainstay. DFW and Phoenix were among the last ones they did. The company itself had a long road — it started as the Westinghouse Transportation Division out of West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, then got sold to AEG, changed hands again to a Daimler transportation arm, and was eventually sold to Bombardier in Canada, who more or less wound it down.

The VASSA concept actually outlived the rack-mounted box George and the young engineer first built. It still exists today, but it's far more software than hardware now. What started as a 19" rack unit is, these days, basically a chip. The principle hasn't changed, though. It was never synthetic. You speak into a microphone, the device turns your voice into a digital signal and lets you modify it into whatever you want, which makes it a vocoder at heart.

One of George's favorite memories from back then is a TV news story about the voice. The camera caught a kid in a Star Wars jacket riding the train, grinning and loving every second of that robotic announcer. Somebody even mailed a VHS tape of the segment around. Decades later, that same delight is exactly what brought George and Andrew together.