Why 2 IIT researchers made a website that turns the metro into music

“We did not want to just promote the idea that RRTS is a perfect solution,” Khanna says, and adds, “We just wanted to talk about who the system is actually accessible to, who benefits, and what happens to the people who still have to depend on cheaper, slower modes of transport while a faster alternative is out of reach.”

Founders, Adwitiyaa Pramanik and Atishay Khanna

Bonding over trivia, experiences

Playing transit trivia is what many in these groups have bonded over during these community gatherings over the weeks. For some participants like Suryaansh Chopra, a 21-year-old B Com graduate, these gatherings have been “full of zeal and warmth”. “I have this newfound passion for accessibility and affordability of public transport,” he shares, adding that friends now get “tired” of him narrating random bus routes he spots on the street.

For others, the experience holds a deeper meaning. No erasure — the promise that the duo made in one of the posts was what drew a 26-year-old participant to a Pride-themed ride in June. He was hesitant at first, but then he met a non-binary rider who spoke about the anxiety of being frisked while commuting, leading to a conversation about how public transit intersects with identity in ways that rarely make it into policy conversations.  “Being bisexual, I have not been welcomed for pride events. Such gatherings helped bring my queerness and love of public transit together without friction,” he shares.

Aindri Dasgupta, 22, another participant, who is pursuing a Master’s in Sociology, points to the Delhi Metro’s affordability and its provisions for disabled and elderly riders to ensure inclusivity.  She describes the women’s compartment, in particular, as a rare space where she can let her guard down. “It is hard to instantly change the patriarchal system… but spaces like these are safe spaces.”

Delhi Metro Jazz website

Music and Metro

Last month, Khanna and Pramanik launched a website to spread awareness on the Metro.  Inspired by a similar New York-based project, which uses the concept of generative music and GPS data, their website turns Delhi’s nine Metro lines into a live jazz ensemble — each line mapped to an instrument, each passing train triggering a note.

The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), however, doesn’t publish real-time data for its nine lines.

So Khanna and Pramanik built a simulation using what was publicly available — line lengths, station counts, and typical headways. “We weren’t trying to create technically perfect jazz; a friend helped us with the music,” Khanna says. “We were more interested in taking some of the ideas behind jazz, where different things are happening at the same time.” A Metro network, after all, is already something like an ensemble: multiple lines running independently, never quite synchronised, always in conversation.

What the website does, more than anything, is give people who would never read a transit policy thread a reason to think about the Metro. For Ashwin, the website became a “unique take on tracking public transit and having the infrastructure to not track it”. He points out that projects like this showcase what’s technically possible with public data, and they pull more attention toward the state of that data and the systems it describes.

Discussions on the queer experience during the “Pride Ride” on the DTC Bus.

Aindri Dasgupta, 22,  meanwhile, connects the site’s mood directly to her own experience of the Metro — the “smoothness with which the train moves” and listening to jazz “might just make you forget tiredness from not getting a seat.”

For Khanna, designing this website invokes personal memories. His uncle worked on designing some of the system’s earliest stations, on the Yellow and Red lines, and as a child, Khanna was occasionally taken along to the construction sites, he says.  “I obviously didn’t understand the scale of what was being built,” he says, but remembers attending the inaugural opening of the Kashmere Gate – Central Secretariat underground corridor around Patel Chowk, at four or five years old, with Dr Manmohan Singh present. “Seeing the Metro go from something that was being constructed around me to something that I now use almost every day is probably my strongest memory.”

For Pramanik, the first memory of the Metro is her mother taking her from Karkardooma to Race Course (now Lok Kalyan Marg) as a child, watching the whole city unfold through the train window.

How does the website work

Once you click the ‘Enter the experience’ tab on the landing page against the website’s dark blue backdrop, the line’s colours glow. On the right is a signal board showing each note the passing line is playing. Press ‘Start Session’ and you hear the lines come alive: a simulation of Delhi’s Metro network, sped up by roughly 40x; each line is mapped to its own instrument, coinciding with the line’s colours. Each has an instrument attached to it — yellow’s the piano, violet’s the saxophone, green the flugel, and so on.

As virtual trains, in the form of dots, pass by each station, they trigger notes that are then woven together using jazz rhythms and chord structures. The website is interactive: one can mute a line, thus an instrument, and make their own versions as well. The right side of the website, titled ‘Signal Board’, tells you which line is soloing, and which key, chord and tempo you’re listening to as well.

Research work

Khanna and Pramanik started working last year on the research project at TRIP Centre under Assistant Professor Dr Rahul Goel. Recalling how they became friends, Khanna says, “Our friendship started largely because of our shared interest in transportation and our fascination with how cities work.”

They are currently working on “wait-time stress”, an attempt to map, block by block, where in Delhi people spend the most time waiting for a bus or train that may or may not show up on time. Using Quantum Geographic Information System (QGIS), they’ve been layering bus-stop density, service frequency, congestion, proximity to Metro stations, availability of alternative transport, connectivity to major parts of the city, and even time of day. From the current tests, they’ve noticed a pattern: Central Delhi, with its density of stops and options, produces comparatively low waiting stress. Move toward the periphery, and that stress climbs sharply — fewer stops, fewer alternatives, longer, more uncertain waits.

Mapping waiting-time stress of buses in Delhi: Red indicates highest waiting time-stress, orange the middle, while green indicates the lowest. (Courtesy of Atishay Khanna)

A third, newer strand of work looks past transit altogether, at the gulleys, that are the narrow, neglected gaps between buildings where garbage accumulates, water stagnates, and pipes are exposed because no one takes ownership of them. The duo is piloting a cleanup and redesign of one such gully in South Delhi’s Saidulajab, turning a dead space into something usable for the neighbourhood. The pilot itself hasn’t started. But the team has spent recent weeks finding collaborators who can help, and work is expected to begin within the next two weeks.

Adwitiyaa speaking to DTC workers about their working conditions.

Next for the duo is Galilee Studios, a venture in the works through which they hope to work more formally on human-centric public space and neighbourhood design.