JR East is already in the process of eliminating departure melodies as they transition to one-man station operations, so these will unfortunately be gone sooner than later. The Nambu and Joban lines got rid of them last year and it looks like the Yamanote is scheduled for them to be gone by 2030 [1].
I'm sure they can figure out a way to trigger custom melodies with RFID or similar eventually. Keikyu figured out how to recreate their departure boards [2]. JR might be less willing to come up with something immediately given the optics around automating someone out of a job.
This is lovely - I used to use YouTube recordings of Yamanote line trips as a way to fall asleep.
As a small bit of feedback - from the sleep perspective, the melodies and door chimes seem quite loud and frequent - would love an even more "backgroundy" version where the ambient travel sections are longer, and those chimes and melodies are quieter. Perhaps even with masking of human noises.
I love this :) Thanks very much for making it, it's elegantly designed.
Since you asked for feedback: in terms of usability, I found the 'seek next' and 'seek previous' buttons confusing, since they're positioned left/right but control motion up/down, and even switch their direction based on loop. (This is because "forward" and "back" also change based on loop -- an indicator for that would help.) Adding navigation via mouse wheel would be perfect here too.
Sorry to ask for even more, but I'd personally love to see door opening / door closing sounds added (along with 'ドアが閉まります' and the alarm) to fully round out the soundscape.
Don't mean to be too picky! -- it's very enjoyable as is.
This is really cool! Really give a immersion vibe.
I've built something different, Tokyo Train Orchestra (http://tokyo-train-orchestra.netlify.app/) It uses live and scheduled tokyo train/subway timetable to produce music.
No real feedback other than it's pretty awesome. It'd be cool to have a version of the display above the doors that shows the upcoming stations, but I'm not sure in practice if that would be that useful since I assume most people would have that in the background as you point out.
What an incredibly detailed and calming project! I am really impressed with how you connected so many different audio materials to create a final PWA product. The very fact that it works offline and acts like a native application is enough to make it a great background soundtrack for focused work.
I saw your mentioning of Claude Code as a means for handling PWA backend and offline caching issues. As a person who usually creates everything manually, I am willing to find out how it went for you. Did this solution manage to master the technical side of Service Workers and caching techniques at once or did it take a lot of iterations to get everything in order?
https://youtube.com/watch?v=y549gDNLxQU
JR East is already in the process of eliminating departure melodies as they transition to one-man station operations, so these will unfortunately be gone sooner than later. The Nambu and Joban lines got rid of them last year and it looks like the Yamanote is scheduled for them to be gone by 2030 [1].
I'm sure they can figure out a way to trigger custom melodies with RFID or similar eventually. Keikyu figured out how to recreate their departure boards [2]. JR might be less willing to come up with something immediately given the optics around automating someone out of a job.
[1] https://japantoday.com/category/features/travel/jr-east-axes...
[2] https://soranews24.com/2026/07/04/japanese-train-company-bri...
This is lovely - I used to use YouTube recordings of Yamanote line trips as a way to fall asleep.
As a small bit of feedback - from the sleep perspective, the melodies and door chimes seem quite loud and frequent - would love an even more "backgroundy" version where the ambient travel sections are longer, and those chimes and melodies are quieter. Perhaps even with masking of human noises.
I love this :) Thanks very much for making it, it's elegantly designed.
Since you asked for feedback: in terms of usability, I found the 'seek next' and 'seek previous' buttons confusing, since they're positioned left/right but control motion up/down, and even switch their direction based on loop. (This is because "forward" and "back" also change based on loop -- an indicator for that would help.) Adding navigation via mouse wheel would be perfect here too.
Sorry to ask for even more, but I'd personally love to see door opening / door closing sounds added (along with 'ドアが閉まります' and the alarm) to fully round out the soundscape.
Don't mean to be too picky! -- it's very enjoyable as is.
This is really cool! Really give a immersion vibe.
I've built something different, Tokyo Train Orchestra (http://tokyo-train-orchestra.netlify.app/) It uses live and scheduled tokyo train/subway timetable to produce music.
No real feedback other than it's pretty awesome. It'd be cool to have a version of the display above the doors that shows the upcoming stations, but I'm not sure in practice if that would be that useful since I assume most people would have that in the background as you point out.
Really well done. Love how much care went into this.
What an incredibly detailed and calming project! I am really impressed with how you connected so many different audio materials to create a final PWA product. The very fact that it works offline and acts like a native application is enough to make it a great background soundtrack for focused work. I saw your mentioning of Claude Code as a means for handling PWA backend and offline caching issues. As a person who usually creates everything manually, I am willing to find out how it went for you. Did this solution manage to master the technical side of Service Workers and caching techniques at once or did it take a lot of iterations to get everything in order?
This is really cool. Actually reading this while on the yamanote line going to work!
I love this! Great UI, and the spirit of it is very early web. Thanks for making this. Totally captures the feel of Tokyo!