I gave every train in New York an instrument
trainjazz.com229 points by joshuawolk 2 days ago
229 points by joshuawolk 2 days 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?
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.
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.
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.
The trombones (A, C, and E) are kind of farty. This is not how I remember "Take the A train". Too much realism.
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.
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.
I love the little descriptions that come up for each line (click on the map and it turns into a horizontal "sheet music" score.
That's one of the coolest thing I've even seen. A bit chaotic like NY!
First beats I heard from it reminded me of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. What a legend of an experience, thank you!
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.
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.
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".
> Yeah, I probably don't get art as others do.
There is no consensus on getting an art piece. The great thing I find about art is that it’s different for everyone. Music is art and yet everyone “gets” their preferred genre, instruments, bands, etc.
> maybe I just don't get art at all.
I don't think you don't get art at all. It is just that you don't get art in full. I should note, that no one gets what art really is, if you want to learn how tricky the question is, you should probably ask some trained person about it, like a philosopher of art. They can talk about it for dozens of hours without stopping to breathe.
But there is one property of art that is undeniable: when the art becomes understandable, when you can write rules for distinguishing a good art from a bad one, the art stops being art. It becomes a commodity instead, no one really interested in it anymore.
Lately art is got this rule, so now art is trying to not follow any rules at all. Except the rule of not following rules. It is pretty funny to watch the artists, the lengths they are ready to go just to follow the rule of not following rules.
But there is something else, if you just break rules it doesn't mean that you are creating art. I think there is one more necessary (but not sufficient) property of art: it should stick into memory. Your stones in a metal cage have this property, you remember them, you ask questions about them. It is not sufficient to claim that they are art, but I think it is close enough.
> 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.
Yeah, the music is not very exciting by itself, what is exciting it was created by trains. And HN attracts the people who are not going to be content with this knowledge without knowing exactly how trains could do it.
> So why go to all the trouble to make the final polished version of your idea?
Because the act of creation is fun maybe? And there are people who understands it and can see a piece of art and feel what the artist felt in the act of the creation? It is not so fun to create if you are not going to share your creation with others. I don't know why.
> 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".
Well, there is a difference. To hang 100-ton stone from a rod one needs to overcome a lot of hurdles. They will need money and some bureaucratic approval, because the stone could fall and kill someone. When I imagine a 100-ton stone hanging from a rod I feel nothing. But when I see it, I can't stop laughing. Someone had gone through a lot of troubles to hang the stone, and to do that they managed to convince others that it is very important to hang the stone.
Imagine if I explained the difference. See now?
I don't know, I have some sympathy. Conceptual art is kind of meh. Travel is pointless, everywhere is the same, you can read about places and stay home, everything is unnecessary. Except I'm probably wrong.
I get than seeing someone is different than it being explained to you, but not by much. "Picture 4 big stones with a metal mesh covering parts of them so... blah blah.". I can picture it if you explain it in detail. You can even make a drawing in a couple of minutes and I'll get it. Why go to the trouble of hiring people to move the actual stones and so on?
For traveling it's very similar. I've seen some monuments in pictures first and in real life later. When I see them IRL, it's just... meh. Maybe I've been desensitized to giant structures or to how much detailed a sculpture can be, but even if I realize I have been, the "damage" is done. I can't be in awe of something someone 300 years would find awesome. I can just think "Why did I waste X hours to see this in person?".
That's why I don't really travel anymore. I can get so much information about architecture or statues or nature from photos and videos that seeing the real thing would almost surely be a disappointment. Both the pictures and videos and the real things involve sight and maybe hearing. It's not like I'm reading about a recipe but not being able to taste the real thing.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My exposure to AI music so far has been when I went to the local Japanese takeout to get udon. They had a big Midjourney-looking generated picture of Mount Fuji on the wall, with a cherry tree in front, and falling cherry blossom. It was full of completely unrewarding details that it was pointless to focus on, and the music they were playing was similar: endless soft love songs where each one was almost, but not quite, different from the one before, with lyrics about depending on someone and liking hugs.
This was actually preferable to genuine pop music, because it didn't demand much of my attention, and was closer to silence, which would have been perfection. But it wasn't communicating anything. Communicating is an imposition, and a risk.
I think in 90% of the galleries I've been in the I'm expecting the art to be communicating something so I'm inferring intent or making my own, but by itself art is a poor communication medium imo. So much so we often say it's about whatever YOU perceive from it. Obviously artists set out to invoke --something-- and we accept that and at least some of us try to think on it, but the person perceiving the art is really doing a lot of work to fill in the gaps. Expectations here are aligned.
Most art in stores is just filling space on a wall to bring things together visually. I don't know that anyone cares about it communicating anything other than "the space looks less empty and more appealing for the customer". I don't think the average store owner is thinking any harder than that on it. I guess my point being we're mostly subjected to it based on the perspective we will like it and its cheap.
I think my point is, that the expectation of the people placing the thing for us to view/listen to and our own can be mismatched. I've always viewed the shitty pop in department stores as an imposition on my ears and I've never spared a thought for most wall art in a random cafe, but I imagine the owners are hoping to get something out of it from us. Whether thats satisfaction or manipulating us to spend idk.
I can understand how generic AI slop or even random notes can be better than shitty pop music. If you don't expect it to rival your favorite artists, you won't be disappointed. If you've led to believe you'll listen to a masterpiece and it turns out to be slop or random notes, you'd be disappointed.
Right, but being annoyed by things is subtle, like a dripping sink or a fly in the room. It isn't doing any harm ... unless you really work on arguing for how the plumbing is slowly corroding or the fly is spreading disease ... but it's annoying because it's present, and you didn't plan on it being present. Why is the AI music here, growing in places unbidden, like fungus? That feeling of being exploited, and unable to stop it, can make an intrinsically inoffensive thing into an annoyance.
I get that. I just haven't really been exposed to AI music unless I wanted to be exposed to it, so it doesn't annoy me. I've read about how Spotify and similar services are full of AI music and how it's hard to sift through the slop, but I haven't used such services and mostly rely on (hopefully) human recommendations for what to listen to, so I've only found AI music when I've specifically searched for it. Kind of like if I wanted to study flies and went out of my way to find flies but if flies never came to my home unexpected or uninvited.
Truly random music doesn't suffer from someone trying too hard and making it lame.
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.
A lot has to do with the story. Nobody would likely listen to this as pure music.
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.
How is the bar-to-map transition done? With what framework or calculated manually
classic, crowdsource it to other cities !!
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.
The MTA knows the nights you want to take it, and ensures it doesn't go past Bedford-Nostrand on precisely those nights.
Love it
So cool!
lovely
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.