Yamanot.es: A music box of train station melodies from the JR Yamanote Line

162•zdw•7h ago

Comments

ranger_danger•6h ago

How are these audio tracks not copyright violations?

cammikebrown•5h ago

Pffft, this is fair use

gruez•1h ago

I know "fair use" gets bandied about quite frequently on youtube uploads, but offering full verbatim downloads of any work is highly unlikely to be considered fair use if a court were to rule on it. The only reason such sites are still up is that the rights holders don't care enough to sue.

Animats•5h ago

Good question. The composer and artist of most of them in Japan is Minoru Mukaiya.[1] He's also the CEO of Ongakukan, which builds train simulators for both games and training.

He's done over a hundred original station jingles.[2] Many of the Yamanote Line jingles are classics, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoru_Mukaiya

[2] https://www.ongakukan.co.jp/en/business/music/#melody

ekianjo•4h ago

Seems like he has nothing to do with the Yamanote line melodies though.

unleaded•5h ago

You Wouldn't Download a Train Station

layer8•4h ago

There is some joke involving audio tracks in here.

ranger_danger•6h ago

Another one: https://yamanote.app/

bluecoconut•6h ago

Interestingly this one seems it is from before 高輪ゲートウェイ (Takanawa Gateway) station which opened in 2020, but the numbering shows the gap (JY 25 -> JY 27). That led me to looking it up, and turns out that they introduced the numbering in 2016, and that already came pre-planned with the gap ready [1].

[1] https://www.jreast.co.jp/press/2016/20160402.pdf

QuantumNomad_•5h ago

In the street where I grew up they had to renumber most of the houses one year because a row of new buildings were built, so everyone that was further down the street than the new houses had to have their numbers increased so that the new houses could be given numbers that were in order with where along the street they were built.

I wonder if that sort of renumbering is common or not, and if Japan is better at planning that sort of thing also.

I was too young at the time to know if this lead to any mail delivery issues, and I imagine the postal delivery service was made aware of the change. But I would think that even if they were notified it would sometimes be the case that if your house used to be say number 53 and now it’s 73 that mail that was intended for you ends up in the mail box of the house that used to be 33 and is now 53.

Even if not at first then at least like 3 years later when some random company still has your old address on file and most other mail for everyone in the street is usually addressed to updated numbers.

makeitdouble•4h ago

I'd assume most countries don't bother remapping when it comes to Street numbers ?

France has a suffix system, so you if a buildings are added between 24 and 25 you'll get 24 bis, 24 ter etc.

Japan doesn't care about the ordering in the first place, so a block added between 24 and 25 and 26 will be 32 without any issue.

modeless•4h ago

In Japan house numbers are based on construction date rather than position along the street.

ajb•6h ago

Ebisu has the "Harry Lime" theme from "The Third Man"? Wasn't expecting to recognise any... I wonder who was a fan of that film.

makeitdouble•5h ago

Yes, it's that song.

The station is named after a beer company that operates there, and they used their beer CM song for the station chime as well.

greydius•5h ago

And the brewery got the name from Ebisu, a god who is believed to protect fishermen.

ekianjo•4h ago

Yeah that's him you see on the Ebisu beer cans

bluecoconut•5h ago

The first time I got off at and heard Komagome's tune I mistakenly thought it was some halloween special because it was late October at the time, and the song felt so distinct and unique.

Zee2•5h ago

Why don't I remember the Ueno station being an electronic office telephone ringtone...

modeless•4h ago

Yeah I'm not sure about some of these. Some are duplicates too, is that accurate?

ekianjo•4h ago

When you get this, I believe the actual song is missing

zelliot•3h ago

Here is the correct Ueno melody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGaCcvBcDQc

austinallegro•5h ago

This is up there with the Hard Off in store music. Magnificent!

https://youtu.be/yFLYuKUKXoY

mc32•5h ago

There used to be an OS X widget that had all the station melodies… It’s been a while.

haunter•4h ago

I'm playing JR EAST Train Simulator with the Yamanote Line DLC and I need these station melodies asap as a mod somehow! So good

okonomiyaki3000•4h ago

Takadanobaba has always been my favorite. The Tetsuwan Atom theme song.

marsavar•4h ago

My favourite, when I lived in Japan many years ago, was the Musashi-Koganei melody in Tokyo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT2xTUPveCw

It stood very much in contrast with all the other jingles, and I simply loved it.

ronyeh•2h ago

Is that a fancy dancy version of Sakura Sakura (probably the most famous Japanese folk song)?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jqpFjsMtCb0

ekusiadadus•3h ago

I listen to them every day.

By the way, Ikebukuro’s melody isn’t this one anymore. Bic Camera, an electronics retailer, acquired Seibu, and now their song is played instead. https://youtu.be/9Emi-ZAnnlc?si=G8iazo945capvT5T&t=221

It’s fun, isn’t it?

rootnod3•3h ago

Seibu had nothing to do with it. BicCamera started in Ikebukuro and was influential in building up the area. The jingle change is a campaign as BicCamera is doing a cooperation with the ward to build it out more. See [1]

[1] https://dc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/news/1573062.html

ekusiadadus•2h ago

Ah, my mistake — Bic Camera didn’t acquire Seibu’s site. Seibu Ikebukuro was actually sold to Fortress, and then the property was transferred to Yodobashi Holdings, which is now planning the redevelopment. Bic Camera started in Ikebukuro, so it’s influential locally, but it wasn’t part of the acquisition.

Sources:

Wikipedia – Sogo & Seibu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogo_%26_Seibu SBbit – Seibu Ikebukuro redevelopment: https://www.sbbit.jp/article/cont1/144891

0xWTF•3h ago

How do I get them as ringtones?

agnishom•2h ago

By going here:

https://github.com/morgansleeper/Yamanotes/blob/main/lines/k...

and here:

https://github.com/morgansleeper/Yamanotes/tree/main/audio

kmorg•3h ago

Unfortunately JR East has phasing out the custom melodies and have been standardizing the Yamanote line to always play the same tune. They are saying labor shortages are the reason since they need to press a physical button in the station in order to play the melody.

cbhl•2h ago

Huh.

https://kaisercougarconnection.com/2784/news/musical-trains-...

My impression is that all of the Yamanote line stations are above ground -- I'd have expected it to be possible to have "one button plays the right sound at each station" if you used a standard phone's GPS to figure out which station you were at.

kmorg•1h ago

Its most likely not worth it to JR East to support it anymore since they have had a labor shortage recently.

bapak•1h ago

Huh? What does that even mean? The train already announces the train station name, so why does it need a specific button for the specific jingle? Does not sound right.

presentation•2h ago

They changed the melodies for a lot of the stations recently, I’ve noticed.

positron26•2h ago

Awww. I hadn't been to Tokyo since Covid and the tunes I remember have all changed. Used to like the Shibuya one.

I honestly need to pop up there to some Rust meetups. I always wind up discounting Tokyo, but I've met some smart people at the wrong times.

presentation•2h ago

Other lines have some bangers too - used to live in Koenji and Asagaya, love those.

https://youtu.be/wpw1MWH0AZI?si=ELfOL6QdgYCxHRyU

https://youtu.be/4qFHVCMUrto?si=daYuWZWK_aQizbha

thomashop•2h ago

I'm also a fan of the Yamanote Line.

I made a psychedelic AI audio-visual collage inspired by it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwUSzUvShqcaa

I made field recordings during my last stay in Tokyo. From those, I made a song for each station of the Yamanote line, using the Jingle in the prompt. The visuals were made similarly.

Used mainly Suno, Udio, Runway and Ableton Live.

phantomathkg•1h ago

What interesting is, the implementation is completely simple multi pages HTML5/CSS/Vanilla JavaScript. No framework. And it just, works.

krenerd•1h ago

good old days

searls•1h ago

Does it? On iPadOS 26 and even with Silent Mode disabled I still can't hear anything.

Shadowmist•1h ago

Works fine for me on iPadOS 26. Click on the station names?

tkgally•1h ago

A couple of months ago, riding the subway through Ginza Station for the first time in a while, I noticed that the door-closing melody was from the 1949 song Ginza Kankan Musume [1, 2]. I’m normally not very familiar with Japanese pop music, but I happen to have the song on a playlist I listen to together with my five-year-old grandson. It brought a smile to my face, as it’s a cheerful, very slightly risqué song from the early postwar period, when Japanese popular culture was enjoying renewed freedom. It was fun to hear it in a subway station in 2025.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVYpdBcso3A

[2] https://g.co/gemini/share/d584c36b99ab

ipnon•22m ago

I don't know how to describe this, but Japanese enjoy putting a little bit of joy into every thing, like Ronald McDonald, but real.

notpushkin•1h ago

Nit: if you scroll down a lot, the stations at the top disappear (and get appended at the bottom, which makes sense – it’s a circular line after all!), but the space remains, so when you scroll back there’s a ton of empty space. Maybe remove that empty space after the scrolling has stopped? (Would be nice if you could scroll backwards, too!)

And just to throw in a wild idea, it might be nice if the UI was a variation of the in-train display interface: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Series-E131-500_Insi...

Naturally, it’s not as clean and sleek, but incorporating some elements of it might make this site look more authentic. Maybe something like this? https://files.catbox.moe/8cpp76.png

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