Melody Road
In Japan, Shizuo Shinoda accidentally scraped some markings into a road with a bulldozer and drove over them, and realised that it was possible to create tunes depending on the depth and spacing of the grooves. In 2007, the Hokkaido National Industrial Research Institute, which had previously worked on infra-red lights to detect dangerous road surfaces, refined Shinoda's designs to create the Melody Road. They used the same concept of cutting grooves into the concrete at specific intervals and found that the closer the grooves are, the higher the pitch of the sound; while grooves that are spaced further apart create lower pitched sounds.
There are three permanently paved 250 m stretches of Melody Roads; one in Hokkaido, another in Wakayama where a car can produce the Japanese ballad "Miagete goran yoru no hoshi wo" by Kyu Sakamoto, and a third in Gunma, which consists of 2,559 grooves cut into a 175 m stretch of existing roadway and produces the tune of "Memories of Summer". The roads work by creating sequences of variable width groove intervals to create specific low and high frequency vibrations. The pavements were designed so that the songs were heard right only when a car drove at a certain speed, encouraging drivers to observe speed limits.
Read more about this topic: Musical Road
Famous quotes containing the words melody and/or road:
“Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)
“Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow, dark hours begin,”
—Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)