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I gave every train in New York an instrument
51–60 of 78 posts
Re: I gave every train in New York an instrument
#52Hello 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.
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Re: I gave every train in New York an instrument
#53Hello 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.
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.)
Re: I gave every train in New York an instrument
#54It'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 wi…
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.
Re: I gave every train in New York an instrument
#55This actually sounds like avant garde jazz
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.
Re: I gave every train in New York an instrument
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
> 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 unde…
> 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.
Re: I gave every train in New York an instrument
#57It'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 wi…
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.
I found
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.
Re: I gave every train in New York an instrument
#58Switch between the Map and Bars view for a fun time!
Re: I gave every train in New York an instrument
#59It'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 wi…
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.
Re: I gave every train in New York an instrument
#60How is the bar-to-map transition done? With what framework or calculated manually
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.