Japan has already dabbled here and there with road surfaces that keep drivers awake by using appropriately-placed troughs to play rhythms through your tires. Now the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has gone a step further, with grooved sections of road that boom a melody up through your car. The grooves are a few millimetres deep and 6-12 mm wide; unsurprisingly, the closer they're grouped together the higher the pitch of the note produced. They're planning to use different melodies for different areas, picking songs that have some association to the locale. We'd love to see them burn different tunes into different lanes at nasty junctions so you could instantly tell if you were heading the right way--it would make picking the point at which you go for escape velocity and exit the Shuto Expressway on a busy day a good deal less stressful. Via Slashdot [JP]