The World Is Alive With the Sound of Music

The electric guitar has only been around for three quarters of a century; the classical piano as we know it was born just a couple hundred years before that. What did we subsist on before? Mostly tribal drums, I suppose. Some lyres, maybe some pan-flutes for variety. What with music having been around since at least the dawn of time, it's hard enough to grasp the brief existence of accompaniments as we know it--it's harder still, however, to conceive of what music will be made of in the future. While theremins and moogs certainly have the capability of sounding spacey and futuristic, they place "the future" at approximately 1966.

This week, I have seen two novel attempts at creating music from fairly unexpected sources. Of course, wherever there is music, there must be a music critique, and luckily for you I'm here to do the job. Let's take a look.

1. Stretches of Highway

When I first heard that Japan is really into the slow, cacophonous meandering of pavement right now, I was like, "Well, who isn't? Stephen Malkmus is God." But that's not what they were talking about, and the truth of the matter is much more strange.

A team from the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has built a number of "melody roads," which use cars as tuning forks to play music as they travel.

Oh, Japan. We should have known. So, how exactly does it work? I figured it might be like a record, but it seems more along the lines of one of those self-playing pianos, notch-filled reams of music ever-scrolling.

The concept works by using grooves, which are cut at very specific intervals in the road surface. Just as travelling over small speed bumps or road markings can emit a rumbling tone throughout a vehicle, the melody road uses the spaces between to create different notes. Depending on how far apart the grooves are, a car moving over them will produce a series of high or low notes, enabling cunning designers to create a distinct tune.

Patent documents for the design describe it as notches "formed in a road surface so as to play a desired melody without producing simple sound or rhythm and reproduce melody-like tones."

This is the point where I have to wonder how one even comes up with such an idea, so I'm glad that the article provides the information, crediting the discovery to a Shizuo Shinoda, who is said to have accidentally cut the preliminary tone-producing grooves in the road with his bulldozer.

I wanted to give this the benefit of the doubt. Sure, it's making music by grinding your car over highways, but I always suppose the worst and something nagged at me that it might be a lot more sophisticated and beautiful than I'd imagined. Thankfully, we have the internet to check up on it--and so can you! It's worth it, if you care to brave the lack of English.



I.... I think I heard a song, or at least I heard the pitch of the car's whine on the road shift up and down. The panelists seems unimpressed, and I share their malaise. Not exactly gold soundz there; more like a low-pitched version of running your finger around the rim of a glass. Can you imagine hearing that nonsense impeding on your sound system while trying to make a simple drive through Hokkaido? Not that I'm saying I wouldn't want to visit the road just once, but once the novelty wore off it must get tedious. Adding to it, a few complaints of those who frequent the roads:

Not only is the optimal speed for achieving melody road playback a mere 28mph, but locals say it is not always easy get the intended sound. "You need to keep the car windows closed to hear well," wrote one Japanese blogger. "Driving too fast will sound like playing fast forward, while driving around 12mph has a slow-motion effect, making you almost car sick."

28mph! Where are these roads, in a school zone? Can we not make these roads run at least on 45RPM? All in all, it's great in theory, but in execution the whole thing isn't much more than a fun amusement. That's all it's surely meant for, I would think, but maybe it can be refined a bit more before we start actually calling it "music."

VERDICT: How great would it be if they paved a road that played Pavement? But seriously, folks--aside from the novelty of it all, it sounds pretty terrible. Wake me when we're rolling in high fidelity. Pass.

2. Tesla Coils

When Nikola Tesla first constructed his famous coils, he may have had many things on his mind. The harnessing of electricity, perhaps, and the future of technology. Did he know, then, that in said future one might be able to manipulate the frequencies of the currents coursing through the coils in such a way as to make them sing? Whether it ever crossed his mind or not is a moot point by now, because, a century later, a creative team of tech geeks has made it so. (Invoking, as they did, what surely must be one of the core unwritten rules of the modern internet: if there is a musical instrument, someone will play a NES song on it. No exceptions.)

Twin Solid State Musical Tesla coils playing Mario Bros theme song at the 2007 Lightning on the Lawn Teslathon sponsored by DC Cox (Resonance Research Corp) in Baraboo WI. The music that you hear is coming from the sparks that these two identical high power solid state Tesla coils are generating. There are no speakers involved. The Tesla coils stand 7 feet tall and are each capable of putting out over 12 foot of spark. They are spaced about 18 feet apart. The coils are controlled over a fiber optic link by a single laptop computer. Each coil is assigned to a midi channel which it responds to by playing notes that are programed into the computer software.

Upon reading this, I wasn't expecting much more from it than what we heard from the Melody Roads. Thankfully, once again, we have video footage, and while the Mario Brothers song is great and all, I submit instead a small movement that Tesla himself might have recognized from his era. You, too, may recognize it from Tetris. Roll it.



I think I've seen all I need. It is beautiful.

VERDICT: OMD would have appreciated this, and I could totally see Radiohead using it on their next record. It's not exactly a new invention, but it's pretty damned impressive nonetheless. The future sounds a lot like a staticky fried Casio, and that's all right with me. I'll take it.

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/news/geek/22661/The-World-Is-Alive-With-the-Sound-of-Music/