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 12 hours 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.)
Breezewood 13 hours ago [-]
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hax0ron3 1 days 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 5 hours ago [-]
Jazz was explained to me as musicians having a conversation using their instruments.
tortugapatrick 3 hours ago [-]
Sometimes the internet really delivers. This is one of those times. What a cool idea and brilliant execution.
jannyfer 1 days 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.
8260337551 14 hours 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?
mplanchard 8 hours 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.
kylecazar 8 hours 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.
card_zero 1 days ago [-]
The trombones (A, C, and E) are kind of farty. This is not how I remember "Take the A train". Too much realism.
jnettome 5 hours 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]
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.
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
andai 9 hours ago [-]
Switch between the Map and Bars view for a fun time!
boulos 19 hours 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.
ninju 4 hours 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)
ginkgotree 15 hours ago [-]
This actually sounds like avant garde jazz
bluegatty 11 hours 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.
oveja 6 hours ago [-]
Been listening to this for the past hour an a half. It's so soothing. Marvelous work, thank you.
bevr1337 6 hours ago [-]
Un/mute button throws a fetch error in Safari, fails to toggle audio.
tristanMatthias 21 hours 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.
SebastianSosa 17 hours 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?
Kjue 23 hours ago [-]
First beats I heard from it reminded me of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. What a legend of an experience, thank you!
Guyadou 19 hours ago [-]
That's one of the coolest thing I've even seen. A bit chaotic like NY!
Wow! That is a much more advanced concept. http://mta.me/
mi_lk 1 days ago [-]
How is the bar-to-map transition done? With what framework or calculated manually
andai 9 hours 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.
AlBugdy 1 days 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.
pierrec 1 days 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.
AlBugdy 1 days 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".
jamilton 15 hours ago [-]
Some people say they care more about the concept than the music, but in practice if someone had just posted "imagine if etc" approximately no one would care, upvote, or comment. In reality people actually do care about the implementation at least existing. It's more novel and interesting than the abstract concept.
I don't think most artists make most art with the expectation that people are going to spend hours obsessing over it, if they did they'd be disappointed. Most art has approximately no one pay any attention or care about it, so the creation of art has to be driven by something else. Maybe the artist just wants the thing to exist for themselves, for example.
jonnybgood 23 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ordu 18 hours ago [-]
> 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.
AlBugdy 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
This is tangential to the discussion, but I've always wondered why "philosophy of art" it's not "psychology of art" instead. Philosophy generally deals with things science can't deal with (yet) like ethics, metaphysics, qualia. And art is just about how humans (and probably other intelligent animals) perceive something meant to evoke emotions and thought. It's something science can deal with now, whether it's a "hard" science like neuroscience or a "softer" one like psychology and sociology. From Wikipedia I get:
> Philosophers debate whether aesthetic properties have objective existence or depend on the subjective experiences of observers
So in this case it's actually a type of philosophy, but it seems so useless to talk about something like this. Obviously what's aesthetically pleasing to some will not to aesthetically pleasing to someone else. And anything at all can be aesthetically pleasing. I'm sure many people find a piece of cow shit aesthetically pleasing. Many people dislike flowers and paintings. Things that are aesthetically pleasing to almost everyone are aesthetically pleasing because they share something that can be explained by studying our brains (like whether symmetry is generally perceived as prettier than asymmetry). Do any philosophers really think an aesthetic property, if it somehow has any objective existence, is any different than anything else that we treat as abstract but would have objective existence if we philosophized about it long enough (like mathematical structures or language)?
It's like some was bored enough to create this field when the interesting philosophies were already taken. And it's similar to those "philosophies" that talk about honor or duty and similar things that are so far removed from reality and can't possibly be connected to any ground truth about the world and need to be talked about in sociology circles, instead. Like, we don't have and can't possibly have a "philosophy" of HN comments. We can discuss so many interesting aspects of the comments here, but none of that would be philosophy, it would be closer to science.
> 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.
I remember then because they were in a public park and I thought:
> The city and the government subsidizes this useless stuff instead of fixing the sidewalks. The amount of work to make these statues could've gone into something actually useful.
If that art was made by people with their own money and put in a private place and I somehow managed to see them, I'd just think "welp, those people don't know what to do with their money, but who cares". And I'd forget about them pretty quickly. So maybe the point of the useless sculptures was to annoy me that the government spends public money inadequately. I doubt that was the intention of the artists and they somehow tricked the government into letting them put the statues in a public place because the government subsidizes shitty (IMO) artists all the time and most of those artists actually think their art is good.
And just to clarify, the sculptures are really, really shitty. Literally a badly welded wire care with some crushed rocks above a bigger rock that was barely chiseled, if at all. Something a 5 year old could do if they had the strength to move the rocks or were allowed to use welding equipment. You have Michelangelo's David where you can admire the Michelangelo's skills, the time and care he took to sculpt it... and then you have a bunch of rocks in a cage. It's like comparing the Mona Lisa to a piece of paper someone took a shit on (which I'm sure has been put up in galleries at some point).
> 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.
Definitely, although I'd be annoyed at the wasted resources, especially if they're public money.
> It is pretty funny to watch the artists, the lengths they are ready to go just to follow the rule of not following rules.
Like some kinds of fashion where you try to be unique and express your individualism but you end up looking the same as everyone else.
ordu 16 minutes ago [-]
> Obviously what's aesthetically pleasing to some will not to aesthetically pleasing to someone else.
Yes, but it doesn't mean that:
> it seems so useless to talk about something like this.
What it means, that things become very complex to the point when sciences still can't take over the discourse and philosophy needs to fill the gap. All people are capable of understanding the idea of art. All people appreciate some kind or art. All societies, not just European or just developed countries, develop the idea of art. Some scientists argue that animals also have it, for example Frans de Waal believed that chimpanzee have some sort of art. It seems like an innate feature of Homo Sapience, but what is it? Why the ability to appreciate art was evolved in a first place? How it makes species more fit to select for their genes?
It just happens so biologists have not much to say about the topic. Anthropologists can describe a lot of kinds of arts from different cultures, but they are also can't answer the question. Psychologists tried to define art, but their answers do not look sufficient for me. To be frank, I've read just one psychological book[1] on the topic, and probably not the most influential, but I like the idea that art is based on the contradiction between form and content (and a kind of a cognitive dissonance triggered by it, though the idea of cognitive dissonance was after Vygotsky). I mean everywhere I look, at any piece of art, I see the contradiction. I'm not sure that it is contradiction between form and content in all cases, but some kind of a mismatch surfaces every single time. I'm not sure that this is a sufficient to have mismatch between form and content to become art.
But in any case, what I'm trying to say, sciences try to answer the question "what is art", it just happens that people are not content with the existing answers, and different scientific approaches to the question do not add up into a theory of art.
> So maybe the point of the useless sculptures was to annoy me that the government spends public money inadequately. I doubt that was the intention of the artists
I doubt it also, but the thing is: the artists did exactly that. Then you spend time thinking about it, and moreover you tell me about rocks in a cage. The sculpture touched you, it triggered your emotions and thoughts. This is the goal of a modern artist. Their goal not to annoy, but to trigger emotions. I laugh at such things, you become angry, we are both influenced by art.
> Like some kinds of fashion where you try to be unique and express your individualism but you end up looking the same as everyone else.
Yeah! When you try to look cool and not like others you are also become an artist, and if you end up looking the same as everyone, you are failed.
You remember the caged rocks, so they are not like the others, the artist succeeded. This argument doesn't feel right for me really, at least when we are talking about your reaction: you are annoyed at how public money are spent, not about some traits of the sculpture. But modern art use this argument, and I think it is not just plain non-sense, I just cant get my finger on the grain on truth there. I cant refine the argument and draw a line around it that will play the role of limits of applicability for the argument.
You see, the art should make people stop and think. You stopped and thought about the rocks. I'd guess... I cannot know obviously, but still I'd dare to guess, that you missed the opportunity to reflect on your feelings triggered by those caged rocks? Why you was annoyed? Maybe because people spend resources inefficiently, as you say, but maybe the inefficiency is just your rationalization hiding the real cause of annoyance? I dug into similar annoyance in myself, and I've found that I was annoyed because people do not share my understanding of art. I had some theories that people are mistaken because they do not try to think what is art and what is just plain crap, they just follow fashion. And for some reason it annoyed me a lot. What is this reason, I'm not sure, I think it has something to do with a social status or something like. Like, society I belong to ignores my opinion and goes into a direction I do not approve. It kinda make me a less important member of the society? I can't explain it clearly, because I do not understand it myself. But it is a very interesting observation, and I guess those rocks might become your opportunity to make this observation or maybe some to learn something else about yourself. Though I may be gravely mistaken of course. I can't just look into your head and explore your feelings and their causes, these things can be done only by you.
> You have Michelangelo's David where you can admire the Michelangelo's skills, the time and care he took to sculpt it...
Well... With Michelangelo I'm an example of what you said about the subjectivity of art. I don't see the point of drawing things on a canvas or shape rocks into a form of a muscular guy. I kinda can see the appeal of paintings before the photography was invented, but now they are useless.
I don't think that the book was translated from Russian, I can't find no link to English description, and the Russian article in wikipedia I believe is not good, and the firefox's translation of it into English even worse. But I decided to add the link, because it would be strange to talk about an anonymous book.
card_zero 1 days ago [-]
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.
AlBugdy 24 hours ago [-]
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.
mrweasel 8 hours 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.
drfloyd51 23 hours 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.”
AlBugdy 23 hours 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 22 hours 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.
0xBA5ED 15 hours ago [-]
People dislike AI music for different reasons. Some people think it's just unethical.
andai 9 hours 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.
AlBugdy 8 hours 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.
drfloyd51 23 hours 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.
jackp96 1 days 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.
AlBugdy 1 days 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.
PowerElectronix 1 days 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.
AlBugdy 1 days 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.
card_zero 1 days ago [-]
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.
ianbutler 18 hours ago [-]
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.
AlBugdy 24 hours ago [-]
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.
card_zero 24 hours ago [-]
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.
AlBugdy 23 hours ago [-]
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.
analog31 24 hours ago [-]
Truly random music doesn't suffer from someone trying too hard and making it lame.
dsr_ 1 days 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.
globular-toast 12 hours 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.
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.
MattGaiser 1 days ago [-]
A lot has to do with the story. Nobody would likely listen to this as pure music.
card_zero 1 days 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.
huhkerrf 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
The MTA knows the nights you want to take it, and ensures it doesn't go past Bedford-Nostrand on precisely those nights.
hybirdss 8 hours 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.
xydac 1 days ago [-]
classic, crowdsource it to other cities !!
blinkbat 24 hours ago [-]
Love it
RohanAdwankar 3 days ago [-]
So cool!
andrewqu 15 hours ago [-]
you cooked
ananmays 1 days ago [-]
lovely
cratermoon 1 days 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.
tiveriny 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 19:36:53 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
But then, jazz is sometimes spoken of as expressing the rhythms, sounds, and emotions of the modern city.
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.
What do the technical details look like behind this to get the data?
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.
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.
[1] https://joaonetto.me/projects/music
Reminds me of SnakeJazz
(the mute control in the lower right is always enabled)
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.
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.
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.
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".
I don't think most artists make most art with the expectation that people are going to spend hours obsessing over it, if they did they'd be disappointed. Most art has approximately no one pay any attention or care about it, so the creation of art has to be driven by something else. Maybe the artist just wants the thing to exist for themselves, for example.
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.
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.
This is tangential to the discussion, but I've always wondered why "philosophy of art" it's not "psychology of art" instead. Philosophy generally deals with things science can't deal with (yet) like ethics, metaphysics, qualia. And art is just about how humans (and probably other intelligent animals) perceive something meant to evoke emotions and thought. It's something science can deal with now, whether it's a "hard" science like neuroscience or a "softer" one like psychology and sociology. From Wikipedia I get:
> Philosophers debate whether aesthetic properties have objective existence or depend on the subjective experiences of observers
So in this case it's actually a type of philosophy, but it seems so useless to talk about something like this. Obviously what's aesthetically pleasing to some will not to aesthetically pleasing to someone else. And anything at all can be aesthetically pleasing. I'm sure many people find a piece of cow shit aesthetically pleasing. Many people dislike flowers and paintings. Things that are aesthetically pleasing to almost everyone are aesthetically pleasing because they share something that can be explained by studying our brains (like whether symmetry is generally perceived as prettier than asymmetry). Do any philosophers really think an aesthetic property, if it somehow has any objective existence, is any different than anything else that we treat as abstract but would have objective existence if we philosophized about it long enough (like mathematical structures or language)?
It's like some was bored enough to create this field when the interesting philosophies were already taken. And it's similar to those "philosophies" that talk about honor or duty and similar things that are so far removed from reality and can't possibly be connected to any ground truth about the world and need to be talked about in sociology circles, instead. Like, we don't have and can't possibly have a "philosophy" of HN comments. We can discuss so many interesting aspects of the comments here, but none of that would be philosophy, it would be closer to science.
> 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.
I remember then because they were in a public park and I thought:
> The city and the government subsidizes this useless stuff instead of fixing the sidewalks. The amount of work to make these statues could've gone into something actually useful.
If that art was made by people with their own money and put in a private place and I somehow managed to see them, I'd just think "welp, those people don't know what to do with their money, but who cares". And I'd forget about them pretty quickly. So maybe the point of the useless sculptures was to annoy me that the government spends public money inadequately. I doubt that was the intention of the artists and they somehow tricked the government into letting them put the statues in a public place because the government subsidizes shitty (IMO) artists all the time and most of those artists actually think their art is good.
And just to clarify, the sculptures are really, really shitty. Literally a badly welded wire care with some crushed rocks above a bigger rock that was barely chiseled, if at all. Something a 5 year old could do if they had the strength to move the rocks or were allowed to use welding equipment. You have Michelangelo's David where you can admire the Michelangelo's skills, the time and care he took to sculpt it... and then you have a bunch of rocks in a cage. It's like comparing the Mona Lisa to a piece of paper someone took a shit on (which I'm sure has been put up in galleries at some point).
> 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.
Definitely, although I'd be annoyed at the wasted resources, especially if they're public money.
> It is pretty funny to watch the artists, the lengths they are ready to go just to follow the rule of not following rules.
Like some kinds of fashion where you try to be unique and express your individualism but you end up looking the same as everyone else.
Yes, but it doesn't mean that:
> it seems so useless to talk about something like this.
What it means, that things become very complex to the point when sciences still can't take over the discourse and philosophy needs to fill the gap. All people are capable of understanding the idea of art. All people appreciate some kind or art. All societies, not just European or just developed countries, develop the idea of art. Some scientists argue that animals also have it, for example Frans de Waal believed that chimpanzee have some sort of art. It seems like an innate feature of Homo Sapience, but what is it? Why the ability to appreciate art was evolved in a first place? How it makes species more fit to select for their genes?
It just happens so biologists have not much to say about the topic. Anthropologists can describe a lot of kinds of arts from different cultures, but they are also can't answer the question. Psychologists tried to define art, but their answers do not look sufficient for me. To be frank, I've read just one psychological book[1] on the topic, and probably not the most influential, but I like the idea that art is based on the contradiction between form and content (and a kind of a cognitive dissonance triggered by it, though the idea of cognitive dissonance was after Vygotsky). I mean everywhere I look, at any piece of art, I see the contradiction. I'm not sure that it is contradiction between form and content in all cases, but some kind of a mismatch surfaces every single time. I'm not sure that this is a sufficient to have mismatch between form and content to become art.
But in any case, what I'm trying to say, sciences try to answer the question "what is art", it just happens that people are not content with the existing answers, and different scientific approaches to the question do not add up into a theory of art.
> So maybe the point of the useless sculptures was to annoy me that the government spends public money inadequately. I doubt that was the intention of the artists
I doubt it also, but the thing is: the artists did exactly that. Then you spend time thinking about it, and moreover you tell me about rocks in a cage. The sculpture touched you, it triggered your emotions and thoughts. This is the goal of a modern artist. Their goal not to annoy, but to trigger emotions. I laugh at such things, you become angry, we are both influenced by art.
> Like some kinds of fashion where you try to be unique and express your individualism but you end up looking the same as everyone else.
Yeah! When you try to look cool and not like others you are also become an artist, and if you end up looking the same as everyone, you are failed.
You remember the caged rocks, so they are not like the others, the artist succeeded. This argument doesn't feel right for me really, at least when we are talking about your reaction: you are annoyed at how public money are spent, not about some traits of the sculpture. But modern art use this argument, and I think it is not just plain non-sense, I just cant get my finger on the grain on truth there. I cant refine the argument and draw a line around it that will play the role of limits of applicability for the argument.
You see, the art should make people stop and think. You stopped and thought about the rocks. I'd guess... I cannot know obviously, but still I'd dare to guess, that you missed the opportunity to reflect on your feelings triggered by those caged rocks? Why you was annoyed? Maybe because people spend resources inefficiently, as you say, but maybe the inefficiency is just your rationalization hiding the real cause of annoyance? I dug into similar annoyance in myself, and I've found that I was annoyed because people do not share my understanding of art. I had some theories that people are mistaken because they do not try to think what is art and what is just plain crap, they just follow fashion. And for some reason it annoyed me a lot. What is this reason, I'm not sure, I think it has something to do with a social status or something like. Like, society I belong to ignores my opinion and goes into a direction I do not approve. It kinda make me a less important member of the society? I can't explain it clearly, because I do not understand it myself. But it is a very interesting observation, and I guess those rocks might become your opportunity to make this observation or maybe some to learn something else about yourself. Though I may be gravely mistaken of course. I can't just look into your head and explore your feelings and their causes, these things can be done only by you.
> You have Michelangelo's David where you can admire the Michelangelo's skills, the time and care he took to sculpt it...
Well... With Michelangelo I'm an example of what you said about the subjectivity of art. I don't see the point of drawing things on a canvas or shape rocks into a form of a muscular guy. I kinda can see the appeal of paintings before the photography was invented, but now they are useless.
[1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D1%81%D0%B8%D1%85%D0%BE...
I don't think that the book was translated from Russian, I can't find no link to English description, and the Russian article in wikipedia I believe is not good, and the firefox's translation of it into English even worse. But I decided to add the link, because it would be strange to talk about an anonymous book.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.