urban rhythms

Using the New York City's actual subway system schedule, routes, and expected travel times, recordings of cello pizzicato and a wee bit of artistic licence, Alexander Chen has created Conductor.

Conductor: www.mta.me from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

He chose certain parameters for aesthetic reasons (colours, fading lines, number of allowed simultaneous trains, and how to relate length to pitch). I love how both visually and audibly the lines appear to be plucked. "When a string is in the middle of being drawn by a subway car, its pitch is continually shifting." The pitch of the sound is determined by length of the straight-line segments but rather to avoid dissonance he stuck with, a "simple major C scale but with the lowest note as a raised third E, which keeps it from ever feeling fully resolved."

{via bioephemera}

Meanwhile, French artist Armelle Caron in her Anagrammes graphiques de plans de villes - 2005 / 2008 series takes cities and deconstructs them into their constituent blocks, arranges these by size and shape and reveals the inner rhythms experienced by the pedestrian - like an anagram of a sentence.*


Berlin


Paris


New York


Istanbul

{via Planetary Folklore}