Japanese "melody roads" play tunes as you drive over them
Several experimental Japanese "melody roads" have been deployed, whose cut grooves and bumps play distinctive songs through your car, but only when you drive slowly and carefully down them. This seems like a potentially useful bit of social engineering -- set the musical timing on a road at the safe speed, and combine that with timed traffic lights that reward you with a "green wave" if you stick to the limit, and you'd have a pretty good set of cues telling you how to travel at speed. Bobbie Johnson writes in the Guardian:
A team from the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has built a number of "melody roads", which use cars as tuning forks to play music as they travel.LinkThe concept works by using grooves, which are cut at very specific intervals in the road surface. Just as travelling over small speed bumps or road markings can emit a rumbling tone throughout a vehicle, the melody road uses the spaces between to create different notes.
Depending on how far apart the grooves are, a car moving over them will produce a series of high or low notes, enabling cunning designers to create a distinct tune.
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Ripley's covered a similar experiment in Europe years ago - I believe it was in France.
This clip shows a Melody Road in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHhGzfsqKH0
This could be a great opportunity to hear Juana's Addicion's "Stop" as you approach a tollbooth.
I read somewhere, a long time ago (I know, not helpful having no links) that the concept of "road melodies" was tried in the US. Not sure if it was for advertizing jingles or what, but it happened I think in the 50's or so? This is a novel way to control speeders, but unfortunately any system that relies on grooves running across the pavement or any raised portions above the pavement wouldn't be available in MinneSnowTa, as it would either be damaged by or damage the snowplows.
If the noise it makes doesn't get far from the road (thus not spoiling the sound of the landscape any more than the cars already do) I can see it applied to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum's tour road though. It doesn't get used in winter for cars so it doesn't get plowed, and getting everyone interested in driving at a slower speed would be very nice. I get tired of cars "zooming" (if you can call 15mph zooming) up behind me as I'm enjoying the scenery.
Later,
-cajun
Hmmm, I used to use the bumps on the Causeway bridge (New Orleans to Slidell over Lake Ponchatrain) to set the rhythm to the Ramones. Usually, it was just about the speed limit. "Chewin' out a rhythm on my bubble gum..." How about: "Drivin' out a rhythm in my Saturn Ion..."
I've been suggesting this for years. Everytime I pull up to a toll booth, or get too close to the shoulder, and the car starts to hum, I think "You could make this into a tune".
No lie.
I should have patented it while I had the chance.
Peter
Right, and isn't there a J. G. Ballard story where such bumps or a series of grooves are added to roadways by automobile companies ... not so's to create a melody, but so the vehicles and/or their tires will vibrate in such a way as to destabilize/degrade/disintegrate more quickly, depending on the groove-correspondence of the tires you've purchased, which depends on how much you've paid for those tires ... ?
Pure fantasy, obviously: Planned obsolescence doesn't exist in the real world.
Next up: "Symphony for Road Rage in A(ccident) Minor"
More likely it would play the McDonald's jingle as you approach a rest stop.
This had been done at Disney World many years ago with the intro to "When You Wish Upon a Star" playing as you drove down the road towards the Magic Kingdom entrance.
For some reason, they didn't keep it around with the rumor was that it was freaking some drivers out.
I want the theme to the Twilight Zone etched in my (long) driveway.
I heard that it was never deployed, but was tested on the Disney World airstrip. I'll try to find my source on that.
Got it!
http://jimhillmedia.com/blogs/jim_hill/archive/2005/03/08/554.aspx
According to Jim Hill, the Disney Imagineers did a test of this on Walt Disney World's abandoned airstrip, where the grooved pavement would play "Zip a Dee Doo Dah."
One of my all-time favorite authors (Jasper Fforde) uses this same concept in one of his books (The Big Over Easy, i'm pretty sure). The driveway to Castle Spongg play "Jerusalem" if you drive at exactly 37mph. I always thought that was a neat idea but that it would never work. I was so wrong.
Composer Alberto Gaitan did a similar project in Northern Virginia a few years back [Arlington, VA I think.]
life of a craphead did this similar project in toronto
http://www.amylamwebsite.com/musicalroad.html
If they made tune-playing roads in the US there would be accidents caused by fundamentalists driving over them backwards looking for satanic melodies.
We could eliminate road noise altogether by making all our roads play John Cage's "4'33".
I also thought of this years ago, without realizing that it had been done, of course.
1. Ick. Who gets to decide what crappy tune I'm going to have going through my head every morning while I'm driving to work? That's what my CD player is for.
2. Why would it matter what speed you go? If you sped up it would just raise the pitch. If it did indeed go away if I was speeding, that's what I would do.
3. It would be much cooler to have grooves cut into the road that actually said something, like "Stop ahead" or "slow down". A little more complicated, I suppose, but not impossible.
This is up there with the most stupid civil engineering ideas I've ever heard of.
I want the quietest road possible. If doing the speed limit makes noise, I will do anything but the speed limit.
A far more sensible idea would be to have the road make an annoying noise when you speed.
Utterly ridiculous.
"It's not working, I think my car needs to be tuned."
Murray, the reason why it works is because it's Japan, land of stalked people disguised as dispensers. Nuff said.
Doug Sharp:
Those are the two best jokes of the thread, I'm jealous that you got them both into the same short post... :)
My mother swears that this was tried in the Chicago area in the 1950s, that certain roads would groan "slow down".
I actually live here in Hokkaido & have driven over a few of these things, which was really kinda neat. They normally play some sort of enka song associated w/ the area they're located in, which is a little...well, not my bag, but to each their own, right?
Rather than being used to warn drivers to slow down though, these things are often used on Hokkaido's long, straight stretches (although never on expressways to my knowledge) to keep drivers alert & on the road. In addition for being famous for singing roads, Hokkaido is also famous for having the worst traffic fatality rates in the country pretty much every year (especially w/ so many tourists from Honshu that aren't used to the wide open spaces up here), so this really started out as a way to combat that.
Great to see the Great White Nort' (of Japan) on BoingBoing, so thanks!
RE: "Green wave."
If only.
My experience throughout Japan has been that lights are timed and roads are designed by people who don't know anything about either. 6-lane highways with 25mph speed limits. Stop lights that just mean "no right turn" when red (i.e. you're not supposed to stop unless you're turning right), green lights you can't see until you're right under them because of weird blinds on them--making them impossible to see at the stop line. Green lights that mean "straight or right turn," with no indication of the fact that the opposite lane has a red. Red lights that turn green on one side of a highway, with another stop light in the median, so you have about 10 seconds to move traffic across one side of the highway, where they have to stop in the middle and wait for another 5 minutes in the middle of the highway, instead of just having one light that moves all the traffic at once. Planning for a 5km drive to take 30 minutes even in the middle of the day with no traffic, because there are 7 lights between you and the destination, and they sometimes really are red for like 5 minutes on a deserted street. Concrete dividers down the center of all roads, so you can never turn right to get into a minor street or parking log, and no U-turns at intersections (a rule that everyone ignores). A rule that when you are entering a multi-lane road, from either side, you are to enter the LEFT lane, even if it requires you to cross 2 or more lanes of traffic to do it, leading to congestion (if people follow the rule, which they don't, because it is insane).
Ugh... I guess I got off the "green wave" a bit there.
Anyway, driving here is crazy. People are tested on their ability to operate the vehicle on a closed driving obstacle course to get their licenses. As a result, I think Japanese drivers are far more skilled at DRIVING CARS than their US counterparts. Not so much on the FOLLOWING RULES part. You just kind of have to make it up as you go along and hope that the cops aren't watching, because at any time they could get anyone for anything. They're not usually watching, though.
@ #24: My God...sounds like you've lived in Sapporo, too! ;)
I once tried to convince a friend of mine as we wheeled our suitcases through heathrow terminal 2 that they had laid out the tiles in such a way as to play the beats of tunes through the wheels.
I doubt they did, but I still think its a good idea.
What is this Japanese obsession should creating music everywhere?
In many places in Japan, lamp-posts play elevator melodies. I first thought it was a fenomenon of small towns like Nakatsugawa and Beppu, but soon discovered it in Daitabashi in Tokyo.
But that's not all, even the GUTTERS play melodies. The GUTTERS!
Do Japanese people really hate silence so much?
I did a three-page comic on this back in the 80s. A voice said, "Welcome to this test of the musical highway system!" You could tell from the way it was drawn that the music was of inconstant pitch and since it came from the front wheels and the back wheels, it was out of sync with itself.
After 50 miles, the music was over, to the relief of the protagonists. In the last panel, a voice said, "Call me Ishmael..."
I think this technology would greatly improve I-40, especially across the Texas panhandle.
Anything would improve the Panhandle stretch of I-40.
If you think the Texas Panhandle stretch of I-40 is bad. Try to taking I-27 from Amarillo, Tx to Lubbock , Tx. It is the longest 2 hour road trip you will ever take!