ScotRail audio announcements as an interactive database
August 21, 2022 5:31 PM   Subscribe

ScotRail audio announcements as an interactive database
Scottish train operator ScotRail released a two-hour long MP3 file containing all of the components of its automated station announcements, as the result of a Freedom of Information request. I have been having SO much building things with this.

I wrote up a detailed blog post describing my experiments so far - two that are particularly fun are this page which generates a random apology sentence on demand, and this tool which lets you assemble your own sentence from a sequence of searches for clips.

Matt Eason split the original 2 hour MP3 up into 2,400 separate files and ran an operation to crowdsource the transcriptions (it took less than 2 hours to get them all done). He wrote about how he did that.

Matt also built Ambient ScotRail Beats with the recordings, which is utterly delightful.
Role: developer
posted by simonw (4 comments total) 2 users marked this as a favorite

I've been enjoying all the things clever people have built with the sound files this week, especially the ScotRailBot on twitter.

This one certainly begged the question: "Why did they have a standardised recording about a wartime bomb that has now been made safe?"

I'll enjoy looking through your links - thanks!
posted by penguin pie at 3:24 PM on August 24, 2022


I'm also curious about the very non-Scotrail snippets. I just tried your random apology generator and it included 'the London overground' which AFAIK isn't run by Scotrail!
posted by penguin pie at 3:27 PM on August 24, 2022


related
posted by aniola at 4:47 PM on August 24, 2022 [1 favorite]


Expect some traffic! Tom Scott just included the Ambient ScotRail Beats website in his most recent newsletter today.
posted by terrapin at 10:42 AM on August 29, 2022


« Older PREY Isn't About What It's About: A Video Essay...   |   TreasuryDirect Wikipedia artic... Newer »


You are not currently logged in. Log in or create a new account to post comments.