Beethoven on the Highway – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.
You ever hit the strips on the shoulder? Don’t worry; I won’t razz you for lousy driving. Let’s just say you were avoiding a deer, and not dog tired and road hypnotized, the coffee in your cupholder doing you no great favors. Yeah, it’s scary hitting the rumbler, especially since it sounds a bit like you’ve got a flat.
But imagine if your next time on the rumbler gave you ‘Ride of the Valkyries?’ Well, the little known United Arab Emirates emirate of Fujairah has a kilometer-long strip of roadway that, if you are going at just the right speed, plays out Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Not exactly Ride of the Valkyries, but who am I to quibble the merits of the two?
So you can hear, or rather, play, Beethoven on your way to work. Toward the end, you hear ‘Ode to Joy,’ which is a great way to enter Fajairah. I’m assuming, as I have never been out of the great forty-eight.
The cool part of this is that you have to be going at exactly 60 mph (or 100 kph there) in order to hear the music. Perfect traffic control, similar to painting a fly on the inside of a toilet bowl to encourage men to actually aim for the fly, and in so doing, the toilet bowl itself.
The possibilities for this are limitless. Imagine every road comes with its own soundtrack. And it doesn’t have to be classical. Not saying you could represent James Brown exactly, but we could get melodies, right?
And one awesome possibility is to do it for the whole city, so that you get the city’s ‘score’ if you travel enough. And everyone would drive the speed limit to hear it. For about two weeks, then everyone will be doing everything but the speed limit when the thrill is gone.