DBEBDBDCBDCEDCB!

October 16, 2007 6:18 AM

Searching for an elusive Japanese bus melody...

I spent a lot of time on buses in the Hokuriku region last year, and was struck by the 'lullaby' that would play as the bus left/pulled into a station. I heard it on the Kanazawa-Kyoto and Kanazawa-Tokyo JR Highwaybus routes – who knows, it could have been on more than just Kanazawa buses. This four-note melody was more music-box-like than any other bus/train sound I heard across the country, and I'm dying to hear it again.

I've found the Majin House transit sound archive, however the text is garbled on many of the pages and I often lose track of what I've listened to what what I haven't. Are there any other comprehensive Japanese transit sound archives that I should know about? Bonus points for English text (unlikely) or non-garbled Japanese – I recognize enough city/region names in kanji to know if I'm heading in the right direction.

I don't expect anyone to know the exact melody I'm talking about, but if you can point me in the direction of sound archives I'm prepared to do hours of digging. I'm anticipating a side-trip to Kanazawa next time I go to Japan, so I may just have to record it myself next year! Thanks in advance.

posted by avocet to travel & transportation (4 comments total)

The Majin House site (and indeed, pretty much every site I can find) doesn't cover highway bus sounds, so far as I can tell. It focuses on trains. But the Majin House is definitely the most comprehensive archive I can find; all of the other melody sites I can find (most of them linked from the Majin House's links) are much more scanty in what they have.

And none of the Japanese looks garbled for me at all. Is there a specific page you're having trouble with, or would like translated?
posted by NattyBumppo at 9:49 AM on October 16, 2007

There are a few buses on there! I spend hours at a time on that site, and stumbled across some one night. I was excited to come close.

About 2/3 of the train melody pages are garbled, but the rest show up with legible kanji.
posted by avocet at 9:55 AM on October 16, 2007

The pages will show up correctly if you select the correct Japanese character encoding in your browser. For some reason its not automatically working for some pages.
posted by dcjd at 11:19 AM on October 16, 2007

(I selected Shift_JIS for the pages to properly show up)
posted by dcjd at 11:21 AM on October 16, 2007