Alexander Chen’s MTA Conductor Project

This awesome Conductor project by Alexander Chen turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in real-time 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 (see below).

Subway Details
The piece follows some rules. Every minute, it checks for new trains launched from their end stations. The train then moves towards the end of the line, with its speed set by the schedule’s estimated trip duration. 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. Also, I used the weekday schedule. Some of these limitations result in subtle variations, as different trains are chosen during each 24-hour loop.

The system has changed since 1972, and some lines no longer exist. For example, the 8 train, or the Third Ave El, was shut down in 1973. The former K train was merged into other routes. I decided to run these ghost trains between 12am-2am.
Developer Details

The Technical:
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 MTA does not currently track trains’ live positions via GPS.) The design was created in Illustrator, then exported via SVG coordinates into HTML5 Canvas. He built a version with layered HTML5 audio, but ran into many limitations and bugs when layering multi-shot samples. (See this post for details.) so the audio is being triggered by Flash in the background, communicating with JS Sound Manager.

Massimo Vignelli and his 1972 NY Subway map

More information at www.chenalexander.com & See it live at mta.me




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