Yamanote.fun - Complete auditory experience of Tokyo's Yamanote line
Show HN: Yamanote.fun – A complete soundscape for Tokyo's Yamanote line
Yamanote.fun delivers an immersive soundscape that recreates the entire journey of Tokyo's iconic Yamanote Line railway loop. By combining authentic station melodies, announcements, door chimes, and train sounds, the platform offers a unique auditory experience where each direction—Outer Loop and Inner Loop—features distinct musical themes. Traveling at twice the real-world speed, users can complete a full virtual circuit in just 30 minutes. With support for offline playback, customizable language settings for station names, and a toggleable dark mode, this project serves as both a nostalgic tribute and a relaxing audio tool for fans of Japanese transit culture.
These evocative soundscapes combine the station melodies, announcements, door chimes and train sounds of the Yamanote Line to create a complete auditory experience of Tokyo's favourite railway loop.
- AlexAplin
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...
- coopykins
Please, add an option to make the 'travel' between stations longer to give a vibe of an actual train trip!
- gmurphy
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.
- npinsker
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.
- prodigycorp
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.