A little traveling music, please

My dad was too cheap to have a radio installed in his 1959 Rambler, so if my family wanted music on a road trip, we had to sing. How I wish we’d had singing highways back then.

That’s right: “singing highways.” We’re all familiar with highway rumble strips used to alert drivers that their car is drifting onto the shoulder or approaching, say, a tollbooth. But I was unaware until last week that rumble strips could be arranged so that they play a tune when tires roll over them at a certain speed.

According to a July 7 Associated Press story, a half-mile section of the Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Road that leads into the United Arab Emirates city of Fujairah contains rumble strips that, if a vehicle drives over them at 60 mph, will play the most familiar part of the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, popularly known as the “Ode to Joy.” This particular stretch of road was an arts project undertaken by the Fujairah Fine Arts Academy in collaboration with local government.

Producing singing rumble strips requires knowledge of both engineering and music: strips or raised dots have to be spaced so that a car driven over them at 45 mph for one second will hit 330 rumble strips to produce an E note. Varying placements produces other notes of the music scale.

Being a driver who also happens to be a musician, I like this idea and was spurred to see if singing highways exist elsewhere. They do. In fact, there are almost 50 around the world. As Jackie Gleason used to say on his weekly TV show, “A little traveling music, please!”

The first singing highway, called the “Asphaltophone,” was created in October 1995 near Gylling, Denmark, by two Danish artists. It plays an arpeggio in F major. Others followed quickly. An Indonesian road plays “Happy Birthday.” Japan has more than 30 musical roads, some of which play popular tunes from anime films, such as "Always with Me" from “Spirited Away.” And of course there are several singing highways in the U.S.

The first in the States was installed in 2006 along Route 66 (alternately called route 40) in Lancaster, CA, where a bit of the "William Tell Overture” played for drivers going 55 mph. But nearby residents complained about the “noise” — and that some drivers made several passes over the area just to hear the tune — so city crews paved over the strips only two weeks after they were installed.

The second U.S. singing highway was installed in 2014 between Albuquerque and Tijeras, NM. The strips play “America the Beautiful,” but only if you drive at 45 mph. The state’s highway department hoped that this will cause drivers to slow down and, if not smell the roses, at least hear the music. Plans call for at least eight more musical roads, one in each of the states through which Route 66 passes on its way west — Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California — in time for the 2026 centennial of the iconic highway. Get your kicks on Route 66, indeed!

Pennsylvania has no singing highways currently, but after driving PA roads for 60 years, I know the perfect song should PennDOT be inspired to create one:

AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.”