orchestra21

Conductor is an absurdly cool HTML5 project by designer and musician Alexander Chen that ‘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. Some decisions were made for musical, aesthetic, and technical reasons, such as fading out routes over time, the gradual time acceleration, and limiting the number of concurrent trains. 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. Ultimately I settled on a simple major C scale but with the lowest note as a raised third E, which keeps it from ever feeling fully resolved.

Chen’s design is based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 NYC subway map.

[First seen at kottke.org]