Melody Roads

The Hokkaido Research Institute in Japan has encoded 3 roads with songs. Basically, this is a musical version of rumble strips.

I have to confess, there is something incredibly appealing about the idea. Encoding random art in industrial surfaces seems like a great thing to me. I also have to confess immediately imagining high-tech tagging where, instead of spraypainting your tag on the walls of your neighborhood, you encode a theme song in the road. That just seemed awesomely ridiculous.

However, there appear to be a few practical considerations: the rate of playback is dependent on the speed of the car. If you encode the road for a car going 28 miles an hour (as was the case in the roads in the article), then it doesnt take much fluctuation in speed to have the song pitch-shift up and increase the tempo dramatically.

Finally, I'd expect that the expense of creating the roads mght make them somewhat permanent, and- being a music snob, I can only imagine the kind of road rage I'd experience if I found myself having to drive over "my humps" road every day on the way to work.