Yes, there are roads that play tunes! I didn’t believe it either when I heard about them, but when I discovered that one of these rare roads – only half a dozen are known to exist in the entire world – could be found in Lancaster, California and that it played part of the William Tell Overture, I had to drive out to hear it for myself! INCLUDES VIDEO
Video: Musical Road in Lancaster
Groovy
What makes a musical road “play” a tune? The answer is the cars driving on it! That’s because the musical sound is produced when a car passes over a series of grooves on the road’s surface. The car is like the fingers of a guitarist and the grooves in the road the strings of the guitar. Wide groove spacing produces lower notes while closer together grooves produce higher notes, and by varying the spacing of the grooves a tune is created.
How anyone ever came up with the idea of a musical road in the first place, let alone persuaded civic engineers to put grooves in a nice new road, is quite mind-boggling. But according to my bit of Internet research it is a bulldozer driver in Japan who accidentally scraped grooves into a road and then, when he drove over them, realized their musical potential, who is credited as the inventor of the groove style of musical road. The Japanese have really warmed to this invention because they now have three musical roads – almost half the world’s known musical roads – and each plays a different tune.
The Asphaltophone
The pre-cursor to the concrete grove type of musical road, and according to Wikipedia, the world’s very first musical road, was the Danish Asphaltophone built in 1995. It used ridges of asphalt, rather than grooves, to generate vibrations that produced musical sounds inside a car.
From K to G
Meanwhile, in Lancaster, it was the Honda Motor Car Company who brought this unique form of automotive entertainment to the USA by building a musical road for a Honda Civic commercial. Back in 2008 the Civic Musical Road (as it was known then) was located within residential Lancaster on Avenue K. Unfortunately, residents of avenue K, and possibly J and L too, were not charmed by the results. Who can blame them? Musical roads, as the Lancaster residents soon discovered, have to be driven at a certain speed in order to get the right pitch and produce a recognizable tune. Drive too slowly and they “moan” or too fast and they “squeal.” It is not surprising then that America’s first musical road had a short life, and soon after the Honda commercial was made the road was taken down. However, it must have struck the right chord with enough people to be rebuilt because it resurfaced, and this time in a location well outside of residential Lancaster. You can now find the Civic Musical Road on remote Avenue G, and west of the Highway 154 when you are heading north out of Lancaster.
Good Vibrations
In my opinion Musical Roads should come with a convenient turn around at each end and possibly a gas station as well. They are very entertaining and highly addictive too. I drove the Lancaster Musical Road over and over again trying to perfect my performance. I’m not a virtuoso Musical Road driver yet so I’ll definitely be back again for more practice next time I head Lancaster way.
