mytaxi created the first ever data driven jam session for this year’s Cork Jazz Festival. A world first in programmatic, this live jazz piece was created by translating taxis’ GPS data into music that changed in real time to the city’s movement. We transformed the fleet into hundreds of moving instruments, each one contributed to shaping this live jazz track. Our immersive ‘mytaxi jazzcab’ experience gave the people of Cork city the opportunity to be part of the creation of a never-to-be-repeated composition.

Cork city is filled with a spontaneous energy; it’s unlike anywhere else in Ireland. Its buzz and movement is full of a charm that can’t be replicated. As a brand that’s all about movement, we wanted to embrace this unique aspect, that although mytaxi was a global brand, we thought and acted like a local who knew its city’s street inside out.

mytaxi focused their attention on one of the biggest events of the city’s calendar to show this. The Guinness Cork Jazz Festival attracts almost 40,000 visitors over the weekend, it puts the city on the international map. As the local transport partner sponsors of the event, mytaxi wanted to make sure that Cork knew, that what’s important to the city, is as important to us.

As the official transport partner of the Cork Jazz Festival mytaxi created “jazzcab”, a live AI composed jazz session made by the random movement of our fleet around the city. Data can refine the bigger picture, here we created it, in an immersive experience for the entire city of Cork to be part of.

The process was complex. Firstly, we needed to analyse the city’s movement and its patterns which changed depending on the time and area. Next, we mapped out our moving orchestra; cars were assigned to specific instruments, notes and rhythms. Lastly, we determined the city’s hotspots; these would act as key triggers. Every time taxis passed each other, it created a trigger, our bespoke AI conductor played with 8 quintillion possible musical outcomes in real time to compose a piece in perfect time and harmony.

Our tech team built a custom-made app for our drivers that transmitted the data from each journey to an in-house server. The data was then aggregated and translated into a live jazz piece in real time. The live-stream was broadcast throughout the city and in-cab as well as across all social channels and a micro-site.

mytaxi collected hundreds of hours of data of movement, made by thousands of people, that covered hundreds of thousands of kilometres and translated it into an audio-visual masterpiece. Our fleet travelled 107,480 km in the making of a jam session which played for 16 hours. Every passenger was a player. ‘mytaxi jazzcab’ became the world’s longest programmatic jam session.

Data is often used to enhance a story or paint a clearer picture; here data became the story and the entire city of Cork contributed in its creation. The movement of the people was the driving force in composing this unique piece of jazz as part of the Cork Jazz Festival.

Data enabled anyone to become musicians for the duration of their journey, regardless of their musical abilities. Where they went determined the musical output. Each journey contributed to part of the entire composition.

GPS data was transformed into a musical masterpiece that anyone could tune in to and enjoy during the weekend.

The campaign was impactful on both a growth and passenger acquisition front, the brand experienced positive demand growth, achieving 15% in growth and 17.82% increase in passenger requests. There were over 13,000 recurring passengers year-on-year, a record high for Cork. mytaxi also recorded 1,016 new active passengers who took at least one trip during the festival week.

40,000 people tuned into our live stream which was the same total amount of the people that attended the entire Cowrk Jazz Festival itself.

Our jazzcab experience received strong local coverage in both print and online including, REDFM, Cork 96FM, BreakingNews.ie & Cork Independent. Jazz Ireland also posted about the experience across their social channels.