ATL Bus Sonifier

Project intro

ATL Bus Sonifier turns Atlanta's real-time transit network into generative music. Every note is a real bus or train arriving at a real stop, drawn from live ATLrides data covering MARTA, Xpress, CobbLinc, Gwinnett County Transit and ConnectDouglas. Press play and the city's buses compose for you: the interface lets you tune the musical output with scale selection (pentatonic by default), BPM, volume, kick, pad, reverb and per-arrival cooldown. It's a live data-sonification instrument disguised as a transit map. The build story is stated plainly in the site's own FAQ, in the author's words: "It was vibe-coded, built by working with AI rather than hand-writing the app from scratch." Sarah Lawrence (a programmer, musician and data artist, formerly with AP data journalism) built it by directing AI instead of writing the code by hand — which makes the piece doubly generative: the music is generated by the city's buses, and the software was generated by a conversation. The site is free, requires no account, and works with audio right in the browser.