I gave every train in New York an instrument

https://www.trainjazz.com/

by joshuawolk • 3 months ago

398 75 3 months ago

So cool!

zephyreon• 3 months ago

Very neat. This is an example of digital art that I’d love to see exist in physical form somehow. I suppose it could get rather noisy at a museum but I love the intersection of mass transit & music.

huhkerrf• 3 months ago

The sound doesn't work for me, but I love the description of the G. It does have a cult following: and just like a cult you're tricked into loving it despite its many flaws, like the one hour wait at night or sprinting to the middle of the platform.

bsimpson• 3 months ago

The MTA knows the nights you want to take it, and ensures it doesn't go past Bedford-Nostrand on precisely those nights.

ananmays• 3 months ago

lovely

card_zero5• 3 months ago

The trombones (A, C, and E) are kind of farty. This is not how I remember "Take the A train". Too much realism.

jannyfer• 3 months ago

Interesting and amazing presentation.

I also liked that it didn't explicitly say how it decides when to play a note.

All the subway routes are normalized to 15 seconds long from beginning to end. The app then plays all 15 second routes together, playing the instrument assigned to the route when there's a train there.

Neat commentary on the instruments that were assigned to the route when you mouse over it.

AlBugdy13• 3 months ago

It's interesting that a lot people like this but dislike AI-generated music. The music itself here is completely random to us, yet I can't see how AI-generated music can be worse than random.

The idea is novel/fun/cool, but the notes ARE random as far as we can tell. So if you're against AI music, you just like the idea but don't care about the music or... something else I can't imagine.

I think we can all come up with a bunch of original "hey, if we turn this random pattern of X into music, it would be interesting". But I don't see the point of actually doing it since the result is obviously going to be random uninteresting notes. If I convert my keypresses on my keyboard over the past year or whether my dog licks itself or barks or runs into music, it would still be random crap. The idea of the article is the only thing that made me go "huh" for a few moments. Clicking around and seeing the execution and hearing the music was definitely "meh".

Enlighten me, please.

PowerElectronix• 3 months ago

I think it has to be with expectations. Out of random music we don't expect much, so any result that is nice is good enough. For AI we are promised it's "just as good" but we get generic, soulless music that bring nothing new to the table.

Yeah, it's better than a lot of people, but it doesn't deliver the "just as good" part. On top of that you get that now anyone can promp a song and have a deluge of grey, tasteless elevator music.

AlBugdy13• 3 months ago

So it has to do with our expectations (what we're promised) and with the fact anyone can make it? I get both points but neither seems to be about the music itself.

pierrec• 3 months ago

The music all by itself is not particularly enjoyable here. What's great is the concept, execution, and the way data from an unlikely source is directly audible in the music. What defines art will always be fuzzy, but this particular work is a good example of art I can appreciate: presenting known things in an unusual way, playing with perception to create new connections between remote concepts, and sometimes providing a stepping stone to, as you say, enlightenment.

AlBugdy13• 3 months ago

I've had a hard time appreciating art so far, especially the ones that focus primarily on the concept, like this one. I get that it's novel and interesting, but I can't see myself spending more than a few minutes on it. Therefore, the value for me is negligible even though I can appreciate its novelty.

That's how I feel with most art - "yeah, it's cool, but can I look at something else now?". The time someone spent on creating it seems disproportionate to the time I'd interact with it. Maybe since lots of people will interact with it, it makes sense to do it, but maybe I just don't get art at all.

I see some sculptures that seem really basic, like putting some stones in some metal cage or something equally easy to design or, at least, explain/communicate. And all I'm thinking is "they paid some people to move a few tons of stone and weld some metal rods together... for this?!". My feeling is similar here - the idea is neat(ish) but someone went to all the trouble to actually implement it? The implementation gives us this random music we can play in our browsers but people mention they care more about the concept than the music. So why go to all the trouble to make the final polished version of your idea? Why not just say "imagine if we mapped the trains' locations via gps at specific times to different instruments"?

Yeah, I probably don't get art as others do. I just don't see a difference between "imagine a 100-ton stone handing from a rod" and "look at this actual 100-ton stone hanging from a rod".

MattGaiser• 3 months ago

A lot has to do with the story. Nobody would likely listen to this as pure music.

card_zero5• 3 months ago

What is "pure music"? Who listens to music with no ideas about it?

Of course music can be worse than random: it can be annoying.

I get a downvote, huh? Look, I like Ornette Coleman. I like Nurse With Wound and Merzbow and avant-garde noise. I do not like 21st century pop. If I have to have music played to me against my will, I would way prefer it to be random notes than if it presented a slimy modern personality, or used a tone of voice to sing at me with, or conveyed vapid little bad ideas in its lyrics.

jackp96• 3 months ago

Why do you think people dislike AI-generated content?

It's not because AI-generated music inherently sucks. It's generally C-grade professional music. It's just not novel or especially interesting, and the low barrier to entry means there's a ton of slop in the space.

A lot of people have always wanted to make music, never made it past the barrier of "music is hard," and therefore have no clue as to what makes truly good music. And now that they have AI, they think they can just skip all the boring parts and make great songs.

And while they can skip a lot of steps in the creative process — those skipped steps also help musicians develop their artistic taste and judgment.

And just because these AI "creators" can't tell the difference, they assume others can't either. And then they get mad when critics recognize their uninspired, derivative slop for what it is.

That's not limited to music, either. You see it in coding, graphic design, writing, and pretty much any other LLM-assisted content generation. Maybe it'll change one day as models get better. Maybe not.

This project is original, stylish, technically clever, aesthetically pleasing, and well-crafted. There's a level of polish and intention behind it, and people here recognize that.

AlBugdy13• 3 months ago

Unlike other commenters than seem to place more importance on concept, expectations and whether anyone can make it, yours is the only comment that says AI music is recognizable as uninspired, derivative slop.

I imagine for some genres it would be easy to recognize it as slop, but not as easily for others. It's intuitive techno would be easier to make than trance, which would in turn be easier to make than nu metal.

Can you share some AI music, if you've kept track of it, that's the hardest for you to recognize as unimaginative slop? I'm genuinely interested in how it would sound to me.

dsr_• 3 months ago

A thing can be nifty and clever and thus interesting and elicit positive feelings... about the process.

I don't think anyone will listen to this for the pleasure of listening to music.

AI crap can be much more listenable-as-music but nobody likes the process or the product.

analog31• 3 months ago

Truly random music doesn't suffer from someone trying too hard and making it lame.

drfloyd512• 3 months ago

This is not random in the slightest. Each instrument was carefully chosen based on characteristics of the line. The notes were placed along the line by a human. Each step of the way involved a human making choices. The underlying driver… the trains locations are on a schedule.

There are variations as trains run fast or slow or not at all. Even those events are results of causes.

It might not be repeatable or predictable but it is not random.

Also, an artist made this. I can appreciate the design and flair of another human. AI is soulless. And there was a nothing to celebrate. No one to clap on the back and say “good job”. No one to identify with and say “people are really neat.”

AlBugdy13• 3 months ago

Maybe I wasn't clear with my definition of "random" for this purpose.

The underlying driver… the trains locations are on a schedule.
There are variations as trains run fast or slow or not at all. Even those events are results of causes.
It might not be repeatable or predictable but it is not random.

It's not truly random in a philosophical sense, but it's unpredictable so it's random for us.

A coin toss is never truly random as it's just a piece of metal obeying the laws of physics as it flies through the air. As another example, let's say I make music out of SHA512 of fragments of this thread. Each would be technically predictable and reproducible, yet it would be completely random to us.

Without going deep into whether there's something "truly random" at all, we should acknowledge that the train schedule and all the causes for delays are completely opaque to us when we hear the music, thus making it random to us. Maybe it's different than calling rand() in a programming language. Maybe there are some regularities hidden into the noise. But for all intents and purposes it's random.

You can divide this art into several parts - the concept, the execution, and the actual output, i.e. the random (for us) music and the pretty UI. The concept may be novel, but it's not really wow-worthy. The execution is good, but that's technical. The random music and the UI are OK, but they're not that interesting by themselves, either, at least to me.

What I'm struggling with is why I can't appreciate this as others apparently do. Maybe combining the concept, the execution and the output (or however you want to slice the whole thing) is more than the sum of its parts. But to me the concept is enough. It's kinda funny, in a sense that it would hold my attention for a few seconds. The execution and the output are standard - what you'd expect from the concept. It's almost as if I asked a sufficiently advanced AI "make a page with sounds from different trains based on their schedule" or something similar.

I have only positive feelings for whoever made this, but if they'd made a 1000000-piece puzzle or just stacked 100000 rocks on top of each other, I'd still have the same feelings - "good jobs; glad you were able to take the time to do something you enjoy". And that's it. It's just executing an idea that itself is worth of a quick "hmm" and nothing more.

amelius• 3 months ago

The sound of any running machine can be enjoyable.

I suppose that holds if you expand the scope of the machine to a railway network and you change the timbre of the individual sounds.

drfloyd512• 3 months ago

I don’t actually care for jazz. But I like this for the concept. I listed to this longer than any other jazz I had the option to turn off. Just to explore the results and learn about the different lines. Music, art really, includes far more than the notes, or finished product.

Bolero is an amazing piece of music. Ravel’s brain was suffering from a degenerative disease at the time. We would not have Bolero without his disease. That fact to me turns the piece of music into a meditation on what his mind may have been like. What it might have been to be Ravel.

0xBA5ED• 3 months ago

People dislike AI music for different reasons. Some people think it's just unethical.

globular-toast• 3 months ago

This is an interesting and new idea. Plagiarism has always been a thing. It's not interesting to automate it and turn it up to 11.

AlBugdy13• 3 months ago

I found

https://sonification.design/

where there are floods and evictions and other things unrelated to sound being sonified.

So sonification isn't a new idea. Maybe sonifications of trains is, though, as I didn't find anything like that in that dataset.

Someone should do a sonification of all the links in the sonification site somehow for the ultimate meta sonification art.

andai3• 3 months ago

Well, you forgot that AI bad!

I sent my friend an AI generated album and he loved it, until I mentioned it was AI generated, and then he went a bit pale.

AlBugdy13• 3 months ago

I remember a story about someone my parents told me. They really liked a certain musician (forgot which one, I was told the story like 30 years ago), then my parents mentioned that the musician was gay and then the friend stopped listening to him for some homophobic reason.

mrweasel• 3 months ago

To me the question is more about why you'd do something. I'm sure that there's a lot of AI generated music I might enjoy, but I'm turned off by why it exists.

AI generated music isn't out there as some experiment by some artists, trying to make sense of something, make a statement, or just for the sheer enjoyment of creating something. It's there because of money. I know, there are exceptions, and I'm fine with those.

The AI music I'm against is the type that's made by the likes of Spotify, because they don't want to pay artists. It's music that only exists because Spotify would like to make more money. That motivation, to me, corrupts the product. AI music isn't created for the sake of creating music, it's created as a means towards a goal, money. I don't think that the management at Spotify particularly cares about music, it's just a means on the path to money. If they could be more profitable selling something else they would.

You can argue that a lot of bands solely exists because a record labels wanted to create a profit generating device, or that some artists are artificially created and wouldn't survive without auto-tune and a media machine pushing their music. I think that's bad as well, but often many of these artists do have some level of talent and actually do care about music.

xydac• 3 months ago

classic, crowdsource it to other cities !!

cratermoon• 3 months ago

If I could offer one usability suggestion: darken the text displayed at the bottom when a specific route is selected. Currently it's much too light for the white background. I couldn't tell you the exact contrast ratio but I'm certain it doesn't meet accessibility guidelines.

hax0ron3• 3 months ago

I love jazz but it's kind of funny how much this actually sounds like a really experimental jazz recording.

But then, jazz is sometimes spoken of as expressing the rhythms, sounds, and emotions of the modern city.

MisterTea• 3 months ago

Jazz was explained to me as musicians having a conversation using their instruments.

mi_lk• 3 months ago

How is the bar-to-map transition done? With what framework or calculated manually

andai3• 3 months ago

If you want to make something like this yourself, look into the Lerp function, and then look into the math behind "easing" in animation, it's pretty straightforward. (Which I say as a math illiterate person!)

A good example is Terry Davis's "elephant with blue eyes". I think his animation system didn't have any easing.

Another fun one is Another World, a whole game made with a custom vector graphics and animation system.

And, more recently, Flash, based on the same principles.

blinkbat• 3 months ago

Love it

Kjue• 3 months ago

First beats I heard from it reminded me of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. What a legend of an experience, thank you!

tristanMatthias• 3 months ago

I love the little descriptions that come up for each line (click on the map and it turns into a horizontal "sheet music" score.

boulos• 3 months ago

Neat. I wish I could select just a couple lines at once though. I feel like the 1/2/3 plus one of the other lines would make something more appealing.

Guyadou• 3 months ago

That's one of the coolest thing I've even seen. A bit chaotic like NY!

chrisallick2• 3 months ago

https://kottke.org/11/01/musical-subway-map

xnx• 3 months ago

Wow! That is a much more advanced concept. http://mta.me/

chrisallick2• 3 months ago

its a classic :) love map and music projects.

araniwa• 3 months ago

Hello from Japan! I discovered TrainJazz this morning and enjoyed it with my morning coffee — the idea of turning subway movements into music is quietly beautiful.

I would love to see a Japanese version someday. Tokyo’s train network is one of the most complex in the world, and I imagine the music it would make would be extraordinary. Thank you for creating something so thoughtful.

OJFord• 3 months ago

It would be cool to have multiple selectable cities, and compare them like that. I suppose to do it 'fairly' though you'd want to offset them so the peak times etc. lined up, so they all had a commuter rush at once. (London would be buzzing as I write, but the OP is pretty quiet – middle of the night in New York.)

SebastianSosa• 3 months ago

Hey, this is amazing. I've been building another musical toy that I'm terming Euclidean Pulses, but I haven't been able to find a good library for making sounds. What did you use?

ginkgotree• 3 months ago

This actually sounds like avant garde jazz

bluegatty• 3 months ago

I can totally see myself getting larked by this.

It literally sounds as if something is going on, to the point where I'm even questioning if there is systemic patterns in the darn trains!

It's weirdly easy to listen to.

andrewqu• 3 months ago

you cooked

8260337551• 3 months ago

Can someone explain what triggers a note? I don't understand from the explanation on the site. Is it whenever a train on the line crosses a predetermined geo-location?

What do the technical details look like behind this to get the data?

kylecazar• 3 months ago

If you switch to bar view on the bottom, it will be more apparent.

Each line in that view represents a subway line's route. Each note/dot along each of those lines is a train that is currently at that stage of progression through the route (based on geo location from the MTA).

They assigned a different instrument to each subway line.

mplanchard2• 3 months ago

I think every line’s route is normalized to the same length of time, and a note is played when trains are at stations along that route.

If you turn on the map portion of the UI, you can see where the stations are. This is why there’s a dearth of notes over the east river (no stations on the water), other than the one stop at Roosevelt Island, for the F or the M, depending on the time of day.

andai3• 3 months ago

Switch between the Map and Bars view for a fun time!

mplanchard2• 3 months ago

I’d love to see this as an art installation in a subway station, please consider chatting with MTA Arts & Design, maybe they could hook you up with the right people to make this a fixture somewhere: https://www.mta.info/agency/arts-design

hybirdss• 3 months ago

the trombone fartiness comment got me. now i'm wondering if the 7 line would sound better as a slide whistle, you know, for the soul of queens.

bevr1337• 3 months ago

Un/mute button throws a fetch error in Safari, fails to toggle audio.

oveja• 3 months ago

Been listening to this for the past hour an a half. It's so soothing. Marvelous work, thank you.

jnettome• 3 months ago

Wow! I really like this! I have been practicing with sounds in a similar context: I have made the GitHub contribution graph as an space visualization and a music generated based on the graph [1]

[1] https://joaonetto.me/projects/music

omegadynamics• 3 months ago

https://youtu.be/ahgcD1xjRiQ?si=RrCoboXMQ_yw60k5

Reminds me of SnakeJazz

ninju• 3 months ago

Sad, the audio is always muted for me (Windows 10, Chrome 147.0.7727.56)

(the mute control in the lower right is always enabled)

tortugapatrick• 3 months ago

Sometimes the internet really delivers. This is one of those times. What a cool idea and brilliant execution.

loorke• 3 months ago

I like that Americans, and particularly New Yorkers, are so self-centered that they don't even bother to specify which city's train lines are on the map (New York is only in the HN title). Of course, a Ukrainian frontend developer will be familiar enough with the city's contours to instantly recognize the shape of Manhattan from the train lines.

I gave every train in New York an instrument

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