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...Continued

Honda's Musical Road

            They all soon learned that the tune was coming from a musical road installed by Honda Motor Co. designed to play the overture when Honda Civics and other cars drove over it, as part of a selling campaign targeting younger folks. The first musical road in the U.S. is featured in Honda commercials the present began Sunday.

Musical roads are new to Lancaster residents, but there are already a few "melody roads" in Japan. One plays a pop song. A musical road in South Korea plays "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

The roads feature intermittent grooves similar to rumble strips on highways. The grooves are spaced so that a series of pitches play when a car drives over them: Honda's road was programmed for a Honda Civic driving 55 mph but made a noise resembling Rossini's famous opera overture when other cars rumbled over it as well.

In Lancaster, the road attracted tourists from across the country and inspired dozens of YouTube videos , some filmed in the dark. People drove on it repeatedly to hear the noise, which sounded like the out of country warbling of horns. Some even drove in reverse to see whether the song would play backward. (It did not.)

"My kids loved it," said Michael Beck, an aircraft engineer who lives near the road. "They kept making me press over it once again and again."
For Honda, the idea behind the musical road was simple: The establishment wanted its ads to stand out against the other car commercials the pushed fuel efficiency, gas mileage and other standard features ad nauseam.

"We saw the current the industry was receiving actually congested in this segment with power efficiency advertising," said Jeff Moohr, management supervisor of the Honda consideration at Santa Monica ad agency RPA. "We challenged the creative team to do something different, and something youthful who only a Civic could do."
But constant repetition of the overture -- the music associated with "The Lone Ranger" radio and TV series -- can become irksome. Although specific residents of the (usually) quiet neighborhood deliberation the music was great, others respect it got old quickly.

"It was ridiculous. It kept me up half the night," stated Terry Roth, whose backyard faces West Avenue K. Particularly annoying were drivers who parked near his house just to watch further cars play the tune. People got yoyo-ing back and forth, making U-turns and generally annoying the residents and endangering themselves and others,
he said. "For us to pay how we pay for our homes and be affected by a noise like that -- it was asinine," Roth said.
After receiving complaints, the city a few weeks ago gone over over the grooves, ridges and spaces that made the road sing -- recently 18 days after it was installed.

Which is not to say that the experiment is over. Lancaster officials liked the attention and are considering bids from Wal-Mart and a greater amount of potential sponsors to build an additional musical road in a different location. This time, they're hoping to get greater amount of revenue out of it.

" Cities, because of the world economy, are going to hold to get aggressive in alternative means of funding", said Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris. The mayor, an attorney who says he welcomes controversy, envisions a Lancaster in which roads play a number of corporate jingles, and the city cashes in on the advertising fees.
"People say, 'Should we be marketing advertising like that? Is that the correctly role of the city'? "Parris said. "But you have billboards in cities."

For Honda, the possibilities of making a commercial the current could as well become part of the cultural moment -- spreading through YouTube videos and cellphone recordings -- was irresistible. The organization aimed to appeal to young car buyers with the ad, but selling to youth is tricky.

"If you say you're youthful, Generation Y is going to engage you on it," alleged Laura Hauseman, RPA's art director. "We had to prove it and do something iconic," she said.
The association and filmmaking partner Park Pictures put out feelers to various cities and chose Lancaster when of its proximity to Los Angeles and other tourist attractions such as the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve. In Lancaster, they would hit on a town not shy about doing business amongst corporate sponsors. Lancaster didn't charge Honda anything beyond the expense of median filming and construction permits, although the city closed a mile-long stretch of road during construction and filming for five days.

Parris hopes to have the new version built in the next four weeks. He says firms are jockeying to sponsor it, and the city is choosing carefully. Officials are planning to put it by the airport, on a wider road that won't cause so many income jams.

Parris thinks the musical road is planning to make Lancaster more of a tourist destination. He also dreams of making the high desert city the solar energy capital of the world, and says he will drive alt-energy bigwigs during the sonorous street as a way to showcase Lancaster's technological prowess.

The new road will also play the "William Tell" overture, because it's expensive to figure out how to design the grooves to play somewhat new.
Which ought to be annoying.

"It was cool, but it was the same worry over and over," said Gibson's son, 12-year-old Destin Custard, pausing to sing the first few notes of the song. "After a while I just wished it can play something else."