Son of Timatollah

Once upon a time, your favorite cartoon cat had the following idea (in this strip):



Someone—well, someone Japanese—has gone and done it.

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.

The 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.

Patent documents for the design describe it as notches "formed in a road surface so as to play a desired melody without producing simple sound or rhythm and reproduce melody-like tones".

Tuning forks? A circular saw would be the closer analogy, except here, the teeth are in the road surface instead of on the rotating object.

No word on the degree of sonic Satanicity (I'm waiting to see that show up in the search histories) experienced when backing up.

Labels: achewood, backing up, backwards, musical, road, satanic, sound