He turned LA traffic into music you can play

Jay Judah has turned Los Angeles freeway traffic into music. His project, The 101 Plays Itself, pulls live camera feeds of U.S. 101, five lanes wide, and converts the flow of vehicles into something close to a song. A computer program spots each car and assigns it a note. The lane sets the pitch, the speed sets how long the note rings, and the vehicle type sets the octave. The idea started about a decade ago, when Judah took a job on the 10th floor of a building above Interstate 405 and began seeing the lanes as a game of Guitar Hero. "This thing that everyone in Los Angeles just hates, this universally reviled thing of traffic, to me, from up there, just looked like a river," he said. The tool is free online, and listeners can pick their own instruments. Judah prefers a theremin, a harp and a handpan steel drum, running just past rush hour.