Daily Question 41

What eet ees?


Also, your regular blogmaster (read:Srivats) is taking a short sabbatical from the blog beginning tomorrow, uptil Sunday. Vishal has kindly agreed to be your daily quizmaster during this period.

Answer -
A Melody Road in japan

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. The Hokkaido 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.

There are three Melody Roads; one in Hokkaido, another in Wakayama (where, at 40km/h, a car can produce the Japanese ballad "Miagete goran yoru no hoshi wo" by Kyu Sakamoto), and a third in Gunma, which consist of 2,559 grooves cut into a 175 meter stretch of existing roadway and when driven over at 50 km/h, produce the tune of "Memories of Summer"

Went uncracked.