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Discussion (52 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
But then, jazz is sometimes spoken of as expressing the rhythms, sounds, and emotions of the modern city.
What do the technical details look like behind this to get the data?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
I don't think most artists make most art with the expectation that people are going to spend hours obsessing over it, if they did they'd be disappointed. Most art has approximately no one pay any attention or care about it, so the creation of art has to be driven by something else. Maybe the artist just wants the thing to exist for themselves, for example.
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.
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 undeniable: when the art becomes understandable, when you can write rules for distinguishing a good art from a bad one, the art stops being art. It becomes a commodity instead, no one really interested in it anymore.
Lately art is got this rule, so now art is trying to not follow any rules at all. Except the rule of not following rules. It is pretty funny to watch the artists, the lengths they are ready to go just to follow the rule of not following rules.
But there is something else, if you just break rules it doesn't mean that you are creating art. 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.
> 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.
Yeah, the music is not very exciting by itself, what is exciting it was created by trains. And HN attracts the people who are not going to be content with this knowledge without knowing exactly how trains could do it.
> So why go to all the trouble to make the final polished version of your idea?
Because the act of creation is fun maybe? And there are people who understands it and can see a piece of art and feel what the artist felt in the act of the creation? It is not so fun to create if you are not going to share your creation with others. I don't know why.
> 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".
Well, there is a difference. To hang 100-ton stone from a rod one needs to overcome a lot of hurdles. They will need money and some bureaucratic approval, because the stone could fall and kill someone. 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.
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.
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.”
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.