Hokkaido installs musical roads

Japan has already dabbled here and there with road surfaces that keep drivers awake by using appropriately-placed troughs to play rhythms through your tires.

Now the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has gone a step further, with grooved sections of road that boom a melody up through your car. The grooves are a few millimetres deep and 6-12 mm wide; unsurprisingly, the closer they're grouped together the higher the pitch of the note produced.

They're planning to use different melodies for different areas, picking songs that have some association to the locale.

[technorati tags: Hokkaido, musical, roads, industrial, research, institute]