One More Song about Moving along the Highway Can't Say Much of Anything That's New...

[beamjockey]

I am bummed.

Yesterday, friends sent me the news that somebody in Japan has built a road that plays music as a car rolls upon it. There's a video available.

I was talking about this in the Eighties. I've been scooped.

I'm going to go off and sulk.

While I'm doing that, you can read an essay I wrote, originally for a book
George Ewing was proposing. When that fell through, I tried peddling it to a magazine, without success.

For George, I entitled it "The Roads Must Rock 'n' Roll," an allusion to the title of a Heinlein story. Later, I called it "Song of the Highway." I can't remember exactly when I wrote this, but the file I pulled it from indicates that it was earler than July, 1988.

When I was a kid I loved to ride over bridges. When Dads would drive our Studebaker wagon over a bridge's metal latticework roadway, a mysterious and wonderful hum would fill the car. Perhaps the bridge was singing to us.

After getting my own car and moving to Chicago, I discovered that the roadway spoke to me every time I approached a tollbooth. The builders had embedded a series of bumps, maybe an inch apart, in the road, which generated a burst of deep sound. Each zone of bumps was a few feet long, and there were three zones. So sounds of "Brrp... brrp... brrp" came to mean, "You'd better have your forty cents ready!"

.

The principle of these bumps could be applied more generally. The frequency of the resulting tone depends upon the spacing between the small bumps: Two inches between bumps would generate a tone half the frequency of the tone from a one-inch spacing. Thus by laying down little bumps in the road with varying spacings, you could play music as your car drove over them.

Think of highways that play tunes. Think of roads named, not by route number, but by song titles: The Stars and Stripes Forever Freeway. The Hallelujah Chorus Toll Road. The Stardust Turnpike. You wouldn't have to make the whole road musical, just a short cheery signature stretch, maybe a block or two long, in the right lane following entrance ramps. This little song would let you know what road you're on.

Because of the harmonic relationships of the bumps, the songs would always be "in tune," as long as you drove over them at constant speed. The duration of a note would depend on the length of a zone of bumps. If the zone is shorter than your wheelbase, you'd hear two distinct notes, one from the front tires, then another from the rear tires. So it would be best to make the zone longer than the wheelbase of the longest car expected to travel the road. Ten or twelve feet should do nicely. Then every driver will hear a single note from each zone of bumps. By the same token, the spacing between notes (zones) should be longer than this wheelbase to assure that individual notes are distinct.

(I can hear you asking, "What about semis?" I contend that the driver of a semitrailer truck can hear the notes coming from his tractor's tires, but that the rear wheels of the trailer are too far behind him for him to hear their music. So the zones and spacings should be only as long as the tractor's wheelbase.)

A spacing between the small bumps of 3.78 inches will give middle C (256 Hertz) at 55 mph. Of course, going over the same stretch at 11 mph will play a note five times lower in frequency, and at one-fifth the tempo. A car crosses a ten-foot stretch of road in .6 seconds at 11 miles per hour, .13 seconds at 55 miles per hour. Even the first speed is enough for a slow, dirgelike tune. At 55 mph, the notes can be short enough that we can play brisk and lively music.

We could exploit the symmetry of our vehicles to create polyphonic music. In a given lane, the right half could have a pattern of bumps different from the left half. Then the right tires would sing a different sequence of notes, and two-part harmony would be possible. Motorcyclists, alas, would not enjoy this benefit, unless they had sidecars.

How about percussion? We could put loosely fastened metal plates into the pavement. They would make a satisfying "CLANK" as you rolled over them. There are all kinds of ways to vary the sound of such plates.

I don't imagine that state highway agencies will follow my suggestion right away. Probably amusement parks or shopping malls would install Musical Roads to entertain customers while they search for a parking place. Once they began to catch on ("Daddy! Can we drive over the Music again? Please?"), some cities might see them as catchy promotions for tourism.

Imagine that as you approach the exit for downtown Chicago on I-80, the road begins to hum: "Chicago! Chicago! That toddlin' town!..." What about San Antonio Rose? The Lullaby of Broadway? Hurray for Hollywood? Alma maters and fight songs might appear on the outskirts of college towns. State songs or national anthems as you cross borders. And think of crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, as the fog lifts from the Bay, while under you your tires play, "I left my heart, In San Francisco..."

Comments

[del-c.livejournal.com]

There's a bridge in Miami that the late Maurice Gibb said was the inspiration for "Jive Talking", so it could be installed there. Or could we say it already is?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I used to live in Miami, but I think I moved out before that song appeared, so I wouldn't recognize the bridge...

[erik]

I distinctly remember Chris, Todd, and I doing the math to figure out how to make them talk in around 1998. (turns out to be a lot harder; you pretty much have to use steel to get the grooves close enough together).

[eub.livejournal.com]

Did you plan to use pulse bursts to do the formants? That's the only thing I could think of, and I wondered whether that would work out, or whether the impact sound of a tire hitting a microgroove is just *too* unlike a sine wave.

[erik]

We didn't get that far. We figured out what size/spacing you would need for the frequencies of intelligible speech given a tire moving 60MPH, saw that it would take something very hard (like steel) to do it, and that that would be very expensive and also not provide any sort of traction, and stopped.

The idea was to replace the toll booth strips with ones that actually said "slow down!" we figured if you were already going slowly, they wouldn't be intelligible.

[drsulak.livejournal.com]

I wonder if you could go a bit of guerrilla road modifications. Something road colored and biodegradable as a test.

[eub.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've always wanted to have this, too! And I think I remember hearing about someone implementing it a couple of years back... Ah, in fact it was these same people. Maybe they put out a second press release recently.

(eli) (someone's doing it!) [ 5-May-2005, 14:16] (context) (url) (xlate) (reply)
[snapshot] http://www.dottocomu.com/b/archives/002914.html
Now the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has gone a step further, 
with grooved sections of road that boom a melody up through your car.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

My thoughts exactly--Though I've only ranted about the idea to friends and never wrote it up. And I hadn't worried about the details of two sets of tires, I just figured it would sound like bad reverb.

I guess the idea has been in the air for a long time.

Anyway, I'm glad someone has tried it out.

[bigbumble.livejournal.com]

Hmmm! Roads designed for 33 1/3, 45 and 78 mph. Change the speed limit sign on a 33 1/3 mph road to 45 mph and, voila! Alvan and the Chipmunks!

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I drew it up in a comic in the 80s, and pubbed it in my zine.

[concertinette.livejournal.com]

I'm disappointed that I can't find a better article on it, but there was a road in France made in 2000. My fuzzy recollection is that either this road was designed for, or that the existence of this road inspired the idea of, using tire noise for speed control. Who knows. Here's the best reference I could find by a quick googling.

[samildanach.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, one doesn't need to actually send music or speech to send useful information. The traditional speed grooves are essentially a single-bit, "wake up!" signal. One could imagine using descending pitches to signal "slow down!", or a trill to indicate "curves ahead". For that matter, one could use short bursts of Morse code to signal "tune radio to traffic information" or similar.