Road as Medium, Plays Back Music for Honda


(image: gigdoggy)

When we run out of space for billboards on our roads' sides, we'll embed jingles into the pavement.

GigDoggy: "A Japanese engineer by the name of Shizuo Shinoda was the first to come up with the brilliant idea of transforming roads into a playback medium. The system works by cutting thousands of little grooves in the asphalt that produce a sound when a vehicle drives over them. The grooves are a few millimeters deep and 6 to 12 millimeters wide, and the closer you bring them together the higher the pitch will be when driven over. Production cost is about $20 000. Mr Shinoda got the idea by driving his car over markings a bulldozer had previously scraped off a street and realized he was generating a series a tones."

Video below:  music roads in Japan.



From WSJ (thank you, Robert):  the making-of video of the Civic Musical Road in Lancaster, CA that played an overture from William Tell until nearby residents complained. It is now being rebuilt elsewhere.


2 comments:

  1. I'm surprised there aren't more roads like this! It seems like an easy way to turn a no-name town into a tourist attraction in no time. I guess it would get a little annoying if you had to drive over it every day, but just make it on a non-commute road, and you've got a winner.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I really like this idea, definitely guerrilla marketing at its finest. It seems like it may be tough to implement on a large scale, but I guess it makes it stand out even more for those the few that use this medium.

    ReplyDelete

I am moderating all comments to weed out spam (there's a lot of it). Comments are usually approved within a day.

Related Posts with Thumbnails