Name: Why California's Musical Road Sounds Terrible
Uploaded: 2020-04-01T01:12:31.000Z
Duration: 3 min 29 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

If you drive down a certain stretch of highway in the California desert, you will hear music.

It's supposed to sound a little bit like this:

[William Tell Overture, by Rossini, but badly out of tune]

That was the musical road of Lancaster, California.

And as you may have heard, it's a little bit out of tune.

It was a publicity stunt for a car company who wanted to show off how clever they are.

And doing the calculations for something like that isn't really difficult.

A musical note is a vibration in the air at a particular frequency.

And those vibrations can be made by a violin string or synthesised by a computer

or - in this case - made by vehicle tyres hitting grooves in the road.

The closer the grooves are, the faster the vibrations, and the higher the note.

divide by the frequency of the note you want,

and that's how often there should be a groove in the road.

And if people travel at the wrong speed, well, it shouldn't really matter.

It'll just be like slowing down or speeding up any other piece of music:

it'll be in the wrong key, but it'll still sound right to most people's ears.

At this point, I am indebted to David Simmons-Duffin,

an assistant professor of physics at Caltech,

whose interests include Quantum Field Theories and playing baroque violin.

the very first person to figure out what went wrong:

and the problem was probably the English language.

Whoever did the calculations said that the grooves should be so far apart.

Let's say, four inches for the first note.

And they meant there should be a groove every four inches.

But whoever gave the instructions to the work crew

said that the grooves should be "four inches apart".

And that was interpreted as four inches between the end of one groove

They didn't include the width of the groove itself.

The highest note on that section of the William Tell Overture

should be one octave higher than the lowest.

That means the frequency should be doubled,

and that the grooves should be half the distance apart.

And they are: if you don't include the width of the groove itself.

That error means that every note is distorted not by a fraction of its value,

like if you're travelling at the wrong speed,

but by a constant amount: by the width of the grooves.

The higher the note, the greater the effect of that distortion.

And the result is the mess that you are about to hear for a second time.

This is the second musical road built in Lancaster, California.

The first one, built by the car company, was too close to residents,

So the city paved over it and rebuilt it...

And in order to celebrate that take, I am going to put my foot down.