Trains make noise. They screech and whistle, rumble and rattle, wheezing as they come to a stop. But they can also play the saxophone, the guitar and the piano. At least that’s the case when they’re being conducted by Joshua Wolk, who has turned Amtrak’s network of trains into a seven-instrument jazz ensemble, now playing at an Internet-connected device near you.
There’s no cover charge or two-drink minimum, at Train Jazz, as Wolk’s website is known. On a sparse live map that functions as sheet music, trains play notes according to how far they’ve traveled along their routes. Those locations become positions on a repeating 15-second musical measure. The result is a real-time symphony that can be subdued or energetic, depending on how many trains are running and where they are.
“I’m always just in awe of what you can do with data on the internet,” Wolk, a New York-based designer and engineer, said. “Music takes that data and puts it into a form that can only be appreciated by human ears.”
His work belongs to a discipline called data sonification, which turns reams of information into sound — which may yield insights not apparent on the page or screen, while also delighting the listener. The Data Sonification Awards, which started in 2024, have highlighted a musical interpretation of the pace of evictions in New York and “Microbial Symphony,” a composition about the yeast, mold and bacteria involved in the fermentation of our foods.
“Part of the reason why people find sonification so compelling is that it has the power to connect something remote and esoteric to something deeply personal and familiar,” said Matt Russo, a jazz guitarist and astrophysicist who has, with colleagues, sonified black holes. “It can make scientific or technical information more accessible, engaging and emotionally resonant.”
Wolk got the idea of turning train movements into music while attending performances at classic New York venues like Smalls Jazz Club in Greenwich Village. The interplay between order and chaos inherent in travel is also present in music, especially in disciplines tolerant of improvisation, like jazz. “The disorder has such a charm when put to music,” Wolk said.
“My goal was to bring it somewhere where I feel like I would not be upset if I heard this in a great jazz bar,” he added.
Wolk first made a jazz ensemble out of the New York City subways, which is also called Train Jazz. After the subway project gained notice, Amtrak and the luggage company Away, which entered a partnership several months ago, asked Wolk to create a map for the nation’s passenger rail lines. At first, Wolk balked. “I don’t love doing branded things,” he explained. He changed his mind while playing a drinking game a friend had designed. A card he drew required him to apply for a job. “I didn’t want to reinstall LinkedIn,” Wolk recalled. Instead, he agreed to sonify Amtrak’s network.
Wolk said that, as he worked on the project, his corporate benefactors gave him the leeway he needed. (Neither Amtrak nor Away would disclose how much Train Jazz cost, and Amtrak said it was pleased with the outcome.)
Jazz and trains have a deep shared history. “There’s so many jazz pieces of music about trains,” said Rob Kapilow, a conductor, composer and music commentator, from “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” performed by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra in 1941, to “Big Train,” which Wynton Marsalis was commissioned to compose by Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1998.
Kapilow said that Train Jazz belonged to a “long lineage of people transforming the train into art, which is fundamentally, like jazz itself, an African-American experience.” The labor of enslaved people was central to the expansion of railroads in parts of North America in the 19th century. During the Great Migration, trains brought jazz to cities like Chicago. And jazz greats including Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington traveled by train to their performances. “The train was the vehicle of the big band era,” Kapilow added.
Wolk was faced with the prospect of managing a very big band: 300 trains that run daily along 21,400 route miles. “This was definitely more of a challenge than the New York subways.” he said.
He ultimately divided the country into seven geographic groupings of train lines, with each assigned an instrument. Familiar routes take on musical personalities. Northeast Regional trains, which run often and stop frequently, make short notes on the tenor saxophone. The California Zephyr (Chicago to the San Francisco Bay Area) plays long notes on the upright bass, mimicking the longer routes and fewer stops across most of the West. The Mardi Gras Service, between New Orleans and Mobile, Ala., becomes a leisurely piano chord, a choice Wolk said was inspired by “Green Book,” a 2018 film about a renowned Black pianist on a concert tour through the segregated South in 1962. (The film’s title refers to the actual road trip guide to safe travel and lodging options in the Jim Crow era.) Amtrak’s fastest train, the Acela, gets its own instrument: a trombone playing short, fast notes
All this could sound like a jumble — and, in Wolk’s own telling, it did, initially. “The first version sounded totally awful, like a bad club playing house music,” he said. He began to read about music theory and jazz, fine-tuning the chord progression and harmony. “It was sort of like dialing a watch,” he added.
Julia C. Schedler, a statistician at the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo who creates sonifications of her own, said that she fell “immediately in love” with Train Jazz. “He really hit the sweet spot for my ear to do a double take,” she said. “It sounds like jazz, but there’s also something very precise about it that I don’t sense when I hear humans playing jazz.”
She even created an assignment for one of her classes based on Wolk’s work, which she hopes to turn into a broader lesson on data collection.
Sara Lenzi, a data sonification and sound expert at the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain, and one of the founders of the Data Sonification Awards, had a somewhat less enthusiastic experience. “The overall concept is great,” she said, but the execution required taking in too much information for her to be able to enjoy the music unencumbered. “I found it, both as a visitor and a researcher in the field, a bit too demanding on the cognitive side.”
Wolk said that Train Jazz allowed him to exercise muscles that could easily atrophy in an age when powerful chatbots can write entire compositions in a few seconds.
“I do my fair share of A.I. slop work,” he said, “so this is just a really nice respite from all that.”
