Here is why California’s musical road sounds absolutely out of tune
Oct 19, 2017, 5:05 AM
The city of Lancaster, California, has a musical road.
Yup, you heard me right: A musical road. A road that plays music when you drive over it.
Sounds nice, right?
Well. you’re wrong.
The road is supposed to (key word, supposed) play Gioachino Rossini’s famed composition “William Tell Overture.”
The reason it doesn’t is because the road is terribly out of tune.
A YouTube user named Tom Scott went on an adventure to find out what exactly went wrong. Scott credits David Simmons-Duffin, an assistant professor of physics at Cal Tech University, with figuring this out about nine years ago.
The problem, according to Scott? Simple mathematics.
The engineers who built the road miscalculated how far apart the ridges on the road were supposed to be, leading to the messed-up tune.
Scott said this was actually the second wrong musical road that the city built — the first one was built too close to homeowners, who complained about the noise.
