My recent thoughts on ‘Indiscreet music’ and modeling urban sounds just got a whole new variable to deal with. 

"The Melody Road will allow a car passing above it to play a simple tune, which is made audible by ridges on the road’s surface. The pitch of the note created is increased by increasing the frequency of the ridges, and the opposite is also true."

It may be intended to be a traffic calming measure – the video below is a little unclear on whether the resulting Sunn O)))-meets-gaguku drone is calming or entertaining – but what happens when people start improvising, veering out into the other lane to skip certain notes? Or zipping back and forth over one particular note? Total mayhem, that’s what; burning cars dotting the side of the road, strangely beautiful discordant whines drifting through the smoky haze. You mark my words.

While the kind of sound artists I mentioned previously might pause briefly to consider another possibility for generating ‘positive soundscapes’, I doubt the resolution of tyre-on-grooved tarmac is quite high enough for any truly engaging noise.

(Yet just maybe … the actual Highway 61 could be reconfigured to endlessly play ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, ditto Route 66. More plausibly, autobahns all over Germany could sound like, well, ‘Autobahn’. Let’s hope no-one in Hokkaidō is too familiar with Bowie’s ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car‘.)

The most bizarre musical instrument on earth [Deputydog]
Melody Road – speed control using music – best heard at 28 mph [Smart Mobs]
[via Matt Jones]