How to Make a Subway Make Music

I should just set up a direct feed from Biophemera, where I found this.

Conductor: www.mta.me from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

Alexander Chen’s Conductor turns the New York subway system into a string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the program tracks and models actual train departures, accelerating the whole business so that a day’s worth of train activity is compressed into a few minutes; in the resulting video, we watch trains “launch” along the subway-map tracks and then follow their routes through Manhattan; the vid sounds a string-pluck every time a train crosses another train’s track. Voila: Trains playing music. (This’ll make sense when you watch.) The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.

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