[HN Gopher] I gave every train in New York an instrument
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I gave every train in New York an instrument
Author : joshuawolk
Score : 175 points
Date : 2026-04-10 15:21 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.trainjazz.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.trainjazz.com)
| RohanAdwankar wrote:
| So cool!
| zephyreon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The MTA knows the nights you want to take it, and ensures it
| doesn't go past Bedford-Nostrand on precisely those nights.
| ananmays wrote:
| lovely
| card_zero wrote:
| The trombones (A, C, and E) are kind of farty. This is not how I
| remember "Take the A train". Too much realism.
| jannyfer wrote:
| 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.
| AlBugdy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| AlBugdy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pierrec wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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".
| card_zero wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jonnybgood wrote:
| > 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.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| A lot has to do with the story. Nobody would likely listen to
| this as pure music.
| card_zero wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Truly random music doesn't suffer from someone trying too hard
| and making it lame.
| drfloyd51 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| drfloyd51 wrote:
| 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.
| xydac wrote:
| classic, crowdsource it to other cities !!
| cratermoon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mi_lk wrote:
| How is the bar-to-map transition done? With what framework or
| calculated manually
| blinkbat wrote:
| Love it
| Kjue wrote:
| First beats I heard from it reminded me of Transport Tycoon
| Deluxe. What a legend of an experience, thank you!
| tristanMatthias wrote:
| I love the little descriptions that come up for each line (click
| on the map and it turns into a horizontal "sheet music" score.
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