Melody Roads (aka Musical Roads)

Musical roads are known to exist in four countries: Denmark, Japan, South Korea, and the United States of America.

The first known musical road, the Asphaltophone, was created in October 1995 in Gylling, Østjylland, Denmark, by Steen Krarup Jensen and Jakob Freud-Magnus, two Danish artists.^[1]

In Japan, Shizuo Shinoda accidentally scraped some markings into a road with a bulldozer and drove over them, and realised that it was possible to create tunes depending on the depth and spacing of the grooves.^[2]

In 2007, the Hokkaido National Industrial Research Institute, which had previously worked on infra-red lights to detect dangerous road surfaces, 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 pitch of the sound; while grooves that are spaced further apart create lower pitched sounds.^[3]

There are three permanently paved 250 m stretches of Melody Roads;^[4] one in Hokkaido, another in Wakayama where a car can produce the Japanese ballad "Miagete goran yoru no hoshi wo" by Kyu Sakamoto, and a third in Gunma, which consists of 2,559 grooves cut into a 175 m stretch of existing roadway and produces the tune of "Memories of Summer".^[5]

The roads work by creating sequences of variable width groove intervals to create specific low and high frequency vibrations. The pavements were designed so that the songs were heard right only when a car drove at a certain speed, encouraging drivers to observe speed limits.