Alerted by an incoming link on the networked_music_review — Favorite Links of 2007 –I spent an hour touring the hundred “most unusual, thought-provoking, or interesting” of the 359 links posted on iTunes for All in 2007. Among them is the ELECTRONIC MUSIC WRITING GUIDE, which includes a number of words for writers who run out of them — alternatives to such over-used words as pulsing, serene, crackle, noise and drifting; and The Future of the Music Business, which surprisingly asserts “classical music is our future”.

But certainly the most intriguing is the Guardian’s Japan’s melody roads play music as you drive — a post from November ‘07. It seems a team from the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute on Japan has built a number of “melody roads”, which use cars “as tuning forks to play music as they travel.”

The concept, the Guardian’ technology correspondent, Bobbie Johnson, writes, works by using grooves, which are cut at very specific intervals in the road surface. Just as travelling over small speed bumps or road markings can emit a rumbling tone throughout a vehicle, the melody road uses the spaces between to create different notes.

Depending on how far apart the grooves are, a car moving over them will produce a series of high or low notes, enabling cunning designers to create a distinct tune.

You can find out more about melody roads, including where they are, here.