81–90 of 108 posts
Then you move somewhere else in the world and one day you hear the same tune you used to hear twice a day.
Why can't train operators in other countries take inspiration from things like this? It takes very little effort to implement. You could hold melody competitions for local communities. It is a nice thing which sparks joy and it's also something that people would want to travel and experience. You could hold a competition with local schools every year to develop a little 5 second melody. I just think of this from a UK…
I'm also a fan of the Yamanote Line. I made a psychedelic AI audio-visual collage inspired by it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwUSzUvShqcaa I made field recordings during my last stay in Tokyo. From those, I made a song for each station of the Yamanote line, using the Jingle in the prompt. The visuals were made similarly. Used mainly Suno, Udio, Runway and Ableton Live.
Other lines have some bangers too - used to live in Koenji and Asagaya, love those. https://youtu.be/wpw1MWH0AZI?si=ELfOL6QdgYCxHRyU https://youtu.be/4qFHVCMUrto?si=daYuWZWK_aQizbha
Lived in Asagaya for a year .. this sure brought back memories. I'd often walk to Koenji for the nightlife .. what a wonderful neighborhood. I remember the beautiful moments in summer when the school jingle played out over the region - that was another example of Japanese appreciation for aesthetics that I've carried with me all my life. Sad to see the recent development of Asagaya, though. Some classic old Japanese…
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Huh. https://kaisercougarconnection.com/2784/news/musical-trains-... My impression is that all of the Yamanote line stations are above ground -- I'd have expected it to be possible to have "one button plays the right sound at each station" if you used a standard phone's GPS to figure out which station you were at.
Commuter trains always knows where they are by various means. Braking distances for trains is airplane scaled, and so knowing where they are programmatically with accuracy on both trains and at central control stations is important for safety.
At a minimum that's acceptable enough even by modern-ish safety standards, the signalling system only needs to know which sections of track are occupied and which are free, and it only needs to know that at the granularity of individual block sections between subsequent signals. It also doesn't necessarily need to know about the identity of the train, even though in practice you'll want to track that, too, for the convenience of the signallers.
The train in turn doesn't need to know where exactly it is – in terms of safety, it's enough knowing the local speed limit and the state of any upcoming signals, but for that, it doesn't need to know where it is in relation to the outside world. The classic implementation is simply fixed trackside infrastructure telling the onboard safety systems all they need to know.
Historically, any demands for knowing where the train is exactly in relation to the outside world were rather driven by automated passenger information systems and the like rather than the safety-critical parts of the signalling system.
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In the street where I grew up they had to renumber most of the houses one year because a row of new buildings were built, so everyone that was further down the street than the new houses had to have their numbers increased so that the new houses could be given numbers that were in order with where along the street they were built. I wonder if that sort of renumbering is common or not, and if Japan is better at planni…
In Japan house numbers are based on construction date rather than position along the street.
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I don't know how to describe this, but Japanese enjoy putting a little bit of joy into every thing, like Ronald McDonald, but real.
This probably has a philosophical underpinning in Animism, almost everything is anthropomorphized and given a "soul", personality. This has the affect of humanizing the most utilitarian parts of day-to-day life, commuting, a tax office, etc.