IF ~ Music

Can you believe the road can sing?

In Japan, Shizuo Shinoda found that the depth and spacing of the grooves can make different tunes when the car drive over. The Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute, 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 pithch of the sound; while grooves that are spaced further apart create lower pitched sounds.

There are three Melody Roads; one in Hokkaido, another in Wakayama (where, at 40 km/h, a car can produce the Japanese ballad "Miagete goran yoru no hoshi wo" by Kyu Sakamoto), and a third in Gunma, which consist of 2,559 grooves cut into a 175 meter stretch of existing roadway and when driven over at 50 km/h, produce the tune of "Memories of Summer".