Matthew Wilcock turns motorway traffic and movement in the real world into sound art

I was reading through Flowing Data’s best data visualisations of 2025 (fascinating if you like data vis), and it included Matthew Wilcock’s Motorway Cycle project. Composer and sound artist Matthew Wilcock has taken footage from different motorways and transformed the movement of the traffic into twinkling, droney pieces of music.

Matthew places a vertical line across the screen, and every time a vehicle crosses the line, it triggers a sound. The sound is either a droney synth, a calming, soft piano note, or a glassy synth. It’s as if Wilcock has created a music box pin track from the vehicles, with the line becoming the note comb. Depending on how busy the road is, the track will either glide almost like an ambient hum or trickle into refractions of cascading notes. It reminds me of how a lot of generative synths work, and the result is oddly satisfying.

The project isn’t just using road traffic, but those are the longest snippets of music I can find. Elsewhere, there is a hypnotic example of using molten lava to trigger sounds. I’d love to see a series of those, and it’s making me think of other amazing things in the world you could use, like a flock of birds.

For more information about this project and other piano-based compositions he gets up to, follow Matthew Wilcock on Instagram.

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