New York subway as a musical instrument in HTML5

A great project by interactive designer Alexander Chen where newmedia meets a greatidea. Stuff like this always makes me proud of my unfilled vision (can you be proud of something unfilled?), where I were no designer turtled my comfort zones, but just a smart creative person, doing brilliant things, no matter what media or tech I used.

At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.

mta.me is built in HTML5/Javascript. It pulls from the MTA’s public API, which provides a detailed schedule of stops and departure times. The design was created in Illustrator, then exported via SVG coordinates into HTML5 Canvas. 

Length determines pitch, with longer strings playing lower notes. When a string is in the middle of being drawn by a subway car, its pitch is continually shifting.

As Alex describes it on his blog.

Just check out the website http://www.mta.me/ and have fun.