Two years ago, the New Mexico Department of Transportation decided to spice up a particularly desolate stretch of Route 66 between Albuquerque and Tijeras by adding grooves in the road that will play music when you drive over them. If you drive the speed limit of 45 mph for the quarter-mile stretch, you can hear "America the Beautiful" play through the vibrations in your car's wheels.

The grooves in the road work just like the rumble strips or "drunk bumps" that vibrate your car when you start to drift out of your lane. But these rumble strips are precisely positioned to create different pitches when you drive over them. The result? The notes to "America the Beautiful" rising from the bottom of your car.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

The engineering behind the road is pretty simple. As Matt Kennicott explains to Smithsonian, anything that vibrates 330 times per second will produce an E note. This applies to violin strings and car tires alike. So all you need to do to produce an E note is make sure that the car hits 330 strips in one second at 45 mph, a scenario that works out to each rumble strip being placed 2.4 inches apart.

After the apt rendition of "America the Beautiful," molded into the most famous highway in the nation, there is another small stretch of music bumps that plays… the Nationwide jingle. Corporate sponsorship is how a lot of things get done, folks.

Source: Smithsonian

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io