After visiting Japan for the first time a decade ago I became completely enamoured with Tokyo's Yamanote Line railway loop. Particularly the sonic experience of it. Like so many others I fell in love with the charming departure melodies and enjoyed discovering experiences like Yamanot.es (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45045307) here on Hacker News when I returned home.
But it wasn't until my second trip to Tokyo that I truly appreciated how much the door chimes, on-board announcements and train noise were contributing to the rich soundscape that I loved.
I returned home and found myself playing YouTube videos of Yamanote Line journeys as I worked. The combination of sonics, ambience and softly spoken Japanese was incredibly soothing to me.
But these recordings were often incomplete, poorly captured or out of date, and I wanted something far more comprehensive.
So I gathered up all of the constituent parts from Reddit threads, YouTube videos and Japanese fan sites, and set about recreating the experience of riding the Yamanote Line in Logic Pro X. Melody, door chimes and announcement, all stitched together under a bed of train noise and ambience.
I turned those soundscapes into an Alexa Skill (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Paul-Jackson-Yamanote-Line/dp/B07S1...) in 2019 and began to think about a companion website to share the soundscapes with a wider audience.
Seven years later and that website is Yamanote.fun: https://www.yamanote.fun/.
It's a small installable web app that plays the soundscapes like a playlist. All 30 stations and in both directions, since the inner and outer loops use different melodies. You can skip forward or back a station, and there's a scrub bar broken into melody / chime / ambience / announcement so you can jump straight to the bit you want. Each station has its own shareable link (yamanote.fun/jy13-ikebukuro-inner) that unfurls with the right station name and artwork when you share it.
It's a progressive web app too, so you can add it to your home screen and it behaves like a native app. There's an option to offline the audio too.
Under the hood it's relatively basic stuff: plain HTML, CSS & JS, audio served from Cloudflare R2 and the site hosted on Netlify. I was impressed to see how far I could get with the free tiers of these services. I designed the whole thing in Figma (I'm a Product Designer) and used Claude Code to architect and deliver the polished UI, PWA plumbing, offline caching and share-link infrastructure.
I would love feedback, particularly from anyone who's ridden the real thing.
AlexAplin14 hours ago
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...
big_toast14 hours ago
"trains on the Nambu Line have been operated by a team of two staff members, a driver up front and a conductor in the back [...] It turns out that in order to play the station-specific departure melodies, someone has to press an actual button located on the platform, and this has been part of the conductor’s responsibilities"
Ha, thank you for surfacing this.
a34729t12 hours ago
I want to retire and have this be my job
mc330112 hours ago
They might be able to find a few retired-aged people locally, should they keep the non-automated version.
Shank9 hours ago
The news articles are real, but the Nambu line brought their departure melodies back played from the cars themselves late in 2025.
AlexAplin3 hours ago
I should have specified I meant the custom melodies. My understanding was that they're now all generic. https://sheets.works/the-bells-of-tokyo is a good reference for the transition.
bschwindHN12 hours ago
I hope they can find a way to keep them, it would certainly garner a lot of goodwill. Not like people will stop taking their trains because the melodies are gone, though...
For the digital flipboard on the Keikyu line, it's nice they did it, but I wish they would add a bit more perspective to the flippy parts. Right now it looks like a horizontal scanline just moving down the signs to reveal the next station name underneath.
qiqitori3 hours ago
No, it is impossible to keep them. Computers are not that far advanced yet. The melodies can only be played by pressing a button located at the end of the train.
My line lost its departure melodies in March this year :/
throwawayk7h5 hours ago
I think I'd be 2% less likely to visit japan without the melodies. I love those things.
astrobe_2 hours ago
Hardcore fans may like the BVE train sim [1]. A lot of Japanese fan-made lines (add-ons) with custom sounds. Generally speaking, the game is far from AAA, but the "hand-made" feel makes up for that.
The downside is that sometimes it is difficult to install addons or to figure out their custom features because the instructions are often poorly translated from Japanese and websites often have no English translations at all. One should also note that some addons include and run "homemade" DLLs to implement custom features.
It seems that the community is on the decline though, because while searching around I have found a lot of dead links. One can try OpenBVE [2] (partially compatible with BVE), which is less Japan-centric but should have some Japanese lines.
coopykins8 hours ago
Please, add an option to make the 'travel' between stations longer to give a vibe of an actual train trip!
ynniv2 hours ago
+1 Having a travel time speed of [∞, realtime] would make this installation art
npinsker14 hours ago
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.
cavoirom10 hours ago
Adding to this, it would be amazing if the background noise will be louder when the door is open together with the sound on that station.
gmurphy15 hours ago
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.
Zee213 hours ago
+1 on this - would love to have a more realistic timing mode where there are a few minutes of ambiance for travel sections in between station arrivals.
thomashop3 hours ago
I'm also a fan of the Yamanote Line. 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.
prodigycorp3 hours ago
I initially brushed this off as being a clone of yamanot.es. I was wrong, this is delightful. As others said, please add longer train sounds between stations.
carloseduardopxan hour ago
Man, this is great! Like you, when I travel to Japan I just love the Yamanote line too. Sometimes I use YouTube videos as white noise while working. I know it's strange, but it gives some kind of peace. This would be perfect for me if only the ambient length were longer.
ehnto11 hours ago
Super cool and close to my heart, albeit not the Yamanote line for me.
There is an episode of Our Man in Japan with James May where he spends an admittedly short moment with the composer of some(all?) of these melodies. It's a surprisingly thoughtful process, he tries to capture the feeling of the station and area in a short motif. Some of these motifs can contain surprising musicality and complexity, despite being so short.
kitallis5 hours ago
Made a similar thing a few years ago as an app! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ueno/id1658845856
crowd516 hours ago
This is very cool. Brings back memories of when I travelled to Japan 10+ years ago. Thanks!
johncoltrane6 hours ago
Group policy sadly doesn't like newly registered domains so I can't check this one out right now but it immediately reminded me of this one, that I favorited 4 years ago:
stereo-highway9 hours ago
Nice, I just visited Japan a couple of months ago. I wish this was binaural. I still vividly remember hearing this video[1] from the Verge published almost 11 years ago.
thenthenthen3 hours ago
I have a pair of binaural mics, would love to contribute to something like this… problem is, im in China :p Any requests are welcome
alfg15 hours ago
This is really cool. Actually reading this while on the yamanote line going to work!
nokeya6 hours ago
That “install as app” pop up after the first station is clearly unnecessary and utilises a dark pattern - “not now” button is painted like it is disabled. Please don’t do like that.
Zealotux4 hours ago
I went for the first time a month ago and that brings a lot of good memories, thank you!
anorphirith3 hours ago
it’s great if we could increase the ambient sound time frame to simulate the real time between stations, it’s eerie to hear stations that fast
jorisnoo6 hours ago
I love this, thank you! I wasn't aware the melodies are different by direction of travel.
elpalek14 hours ago
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.
jfim15 hours ago
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.
mune2gu-chan7 hours ago
This is great. Listening to this instantly takes me back to when I rode the Yamanote line a few months ago.
nourihab15 hours ago
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?
mrspacejam7 hours ago
Love your site and tokyo.fyi I saw recently. Japan is an amazing country.
millsau8 hours ago
What are you doing? vibe coding and listing to how what on train speakers in tokyo.
millsau8 hours ago
Listen to komagome train station first melody, reminds me of a NES game sound, cool
MikeDods2 hours ago
this is very concerning
737373737314 hours ago
amigo76 hours ago
I love the Gui!
XUEYANZ13 hours ago
Wow! This is really cool. I feel like I were already in Japan when the melody first hit.
znagengast11 hours ago
Takes me back immediately, really cool!
rglover14 hours ago
Really well done. Love how much care went into this.
KristianLentino4 hours ago
I loovveee it, I've been in japan 4 times and those sounds are nostalgic ahhahaha
jsabess248 hours ago
Way cool nice!
popalchemist14 hours ago
I love this! Great UI, and the spirit of it is very early web. Thanks for making this. Totally captures the feel of Tokyo!
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