Yamanot.es: A music box of train station melodies from the JR Yamanote Line
yamanot.es
yamanot.es
The reduction of similar behavior in Japan to things like animism fails to capture the texture of why these things happen, and how they are reproduced in other places, and how ultimately societies across the world act similarly, but for timing issues.
People don’t talk about the Dutch being obsessed with serious work ethic and cleanliness due to protestantism and thus generating De Stijl.
I do legit wonder what the history of anthropomorphism on inanimate objects looks like though. Who was the first person to draw a toothpaste tube that smiled and talked?
Japan just gets a lot of attention as 1. The earliest Asian developed economy and 2. The earlier bubble-era panic over Japanese economic dominance
Noticed the Okachimachi and Uguisudani (and several other) melodies are the same... is that correct, or is that a mistake on the site? I imagine it's hard to have a unique melody for every single station, so I expect there are some repeats throughout the transit system, but those two stations are so close together, it's a surprise that they'd be the same.
https://w.atwiki.jp/trainmelody/pages/273.html
https://wikiwiki.jp/sta_melodys/%E5%B1%B1%E6%89%8B%E7%B7%9A
https://atosmatome.wiki.fc2.com/wiki/%E6%9D%B1%E4%BA%AC%E9%A...
I made a psychedelic AI audio-visual collage inspired by it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwUSzUvShqcaa
I made field recordings during my last stay in Tokyo. From those, I made a song for each station of the Yamanote line, using the Jingle in the prompt. The visuals were made similarly.
Used mainly Suno, Udio, Runway and Ableton Live.
By the way, Ikebukuro’s melody isn’t this one anymore. Bic Camera, an electronics retailer, acquired Seibu, and now their song is played instead. https://youtu.be/9Emi-ZAnnlc?si=G8iazo945capvT5T&t=221
It’s fun, isn’t it?
I go in to a trance state of corporate drone mode with a 営業スマイル(sales smile) and bendy-hip when I hear that tune
When I worked at a gym, they played the same 10 or so songs all day every day. My heartrate rises when I hear them.
Sources:
Wikipedia – Sogo & Seibu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogo_%26_Seibu SBbit – Seibu Ikebukuro redevelopment: https://www.sbbit.jp/article/cont1/144891
It takes very little effort to implement. You could hold melody competitions for local communities. It is a nice thing which sparks joy and it's also something that people would want to travel and experience. You could hold a competition with local schools every year to develop a little 5 second melody.
I just think of this from a UK point-of-view. It's like we completely forget what makes life interesting and everything has to be boring and mundane.
And just to throw in a wild idea, it might be nice if the UI was a variation of the in-train display interface: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Series-E131-500_Insi...
Naturally, it’s not as clean and sleek, but incorporating some elements of it might make this site look more authentic. Maybe something like this? https://files.catbox.moe/8cpp76.png
It stood very much in contrast with all the other jingles, and I simply loved it.
There are possibly-recognizable tunes throughout the system. Vivaldi's Spring comes to mind. I think at Ooimachi.
https://kaisercougarconnection.com/2784/news/musical-trains-...
My impression is that all of the Yamanote line stations are above ground -- I'd have expected it to be possible to have "one button plays the right sound at each station" if you used a standard phone's GPS to figure out which station you were at.
At a minimum that's acceptable enough even by modern-ish safety standards, the signalling system only needs to know which sections of track are occupied and which are free, and it only needs to know that at the granularity of individual block sections between subsequent signals. It also doesn't necessarily need to know about the identity of the train, even though in practice you'll want to track that, too, for the convenience of the signallers.
The train in turn doesn't need to know where exactly it is – in terms of safety, it's enough knowing the local speed limit and the state of any upcoming signals, but for that, it doesn't need to know where it is in relation to the outside world. The classic implementation is simply fixed trackside infrastructure telling the onboard safety systems all they need to know.
Historically, any demands for knowing where the train is exactly in relation to the outside world were rather driven by automated passenger information systems and the like rather than the safety-critical parts of the signalling system.
Kids these days...
Not only you don't need a GNSS to determine a fixed in place railroad station but actually you don't want to use a GNSS to do that.
A simple radio beacon working on ~400MHz is more than enough to solve this difficult technical obstacle.
Of course, this is totally ignoring what the trains do already know where they are because they need to display the current/next stations on the passenger information displays.
I haven't done any website design since the early 2010s, what would a webdev even pull from the modern frameworks to achieve what this site is doing?
Sad to see the recent development of Asagaya, though. Some classic old Japanese dwellings, now gone ..
https://github.com/tramlinehq/ueno – it's downloadable from both app stores.
ドアに注意下さい
Then you move somewhere else in the world and one day you hear the same tune you used to hear twice a day.
The station is named after a beer company that operates there, and they used their beer CM song for the station chime as well.
https://youtu.be/4V6Q5l2S7Co?si=k1M5F6WD3y05wIN2
He also has done live reproductions of SNES music which are well worth a view
I honestly need to pop up there to some Rust meetups. I always wind up discounting Tokyo, but I've met some smart people at the wrong times.
I wonder if that sort of renumbering is common or not, and if Japan is better at planning that sort of thing also.
I was too young at the time to know if this lead to any mail delivery issues, and I imagine the postal delivery service was made aware of the change. But I would think that even if they were notified it would sometimes be the case that if your house used to be say number 53 and now it’s 73 that mail that was intended for you ends up in the mail box of the house that used to be 33 and is now 53.
Even if not at first then at least like 3 years later when some random company still has your old address on file and most other mail for everyone in the street is usually addressed to updated numbers.
France has a suffix system, so you if a buildings are added between 24 and 25 you'll get 24 bis, 24 ter etc.
Japan doesn't care about the ordering in the first place, so a block added between 24 and 25 and 26 will be 32 without any issue.
He's done over a hundred original station jingles.[2] Many of the Yamanote Line jingles are classics, though.
I'm surprised copyright trolls are not buying IP from defunct game/film/music companies and suing youtubers left and right for uploading video game music and anime OSTs.
If I were a sociopath and didn't care how I make my money, I draft some legit-looking legal threat letter template demanding $10,000 to avoid a civil lawsuit worth millions, fill in the blanks with a name, IP address, and title of pirated content, then mail out the letters by the tens of thousands using USPS-subsidized cheap mail.
If you mail out about 20k of these threats, you only need 3 of them to pay up to come out on top.
Someone in Japan will surely be indignant about the all the lost revenue from people who are not buying a CD full of train station jingles.