What is this?
Busphony is a bus powered syntheziser with a map interface, 81 pads are overlaid on a map of the city of Reykjavik. Each pad triggers a synthesizer note (you can try it out by hovering above the pads).
Every 15 seconds Busphony fetches the current position of the buses in busroutes selected by the user, the location of each bus is then shown on the map and the corresponding synth pad/note is triggered.
Press play and if any busses are currently running you should hear the results shortly. The result is a pretty horrid sounding cacophony, but it is, in my opinion anyway, mildly amusing.
How does it work?
The synthesizer uses the web audio api, the map is powered by the Google Maps api, bus positioning is fetched from Apis.is and the whole thing is tied together with some coffeescript/javascript code by yours truly.
This is silly
Yes it is.
And useless...
Well, kind of, but it was originally conceived as a way to notify me when the bus was headed my way. Here is a link to a busphony that plays a note when the number four is getting close to my place, I use this to know when to head out the door and catch the bus.