Musical roads - the new media space?

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

For those of you wondering, Honda tried to turn this into a promotion in Lancaster Ca by producing the William Tell Overture, only for it to be covered over a few days later to residents complaining it 'drove' them mad. Perhaps it was the choice of tune - maybe "Drive my car" would have been a more fitting song?

Read more about Honda's efforts here and here thanks to Wired. Or learn where it all began below:

Road as Medium

"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."

Check out the Youtube demonstration below:



Thanks to FutureLab. The original post can be found here.