We’re going to start with exhibit A. This, my friends, is one of my favorite commercials. It ranks a close second to the Nanerpus.

And… why not…

There were “making of” clips on the Honda website during that ad campaign that showed the composer’s process and the crazy looking sheet music. They staged that parking garage performance for the commercial, but the recording sessions used a ton of microphones and I’m sure they spent a long time mixing and editing. Definitely a great combination of creativity, musical performance and technology.

Now, has anyone seen the more recent Honda commercial for the “musical road” they created in California? It was a very cool concept – they cut groves in the road spaced out so that the relative frequencies would be musical and it would generate a tune when you drove over at a constant speed. They used the theme from the William Tell Overture – public domain, easily recognizable, only 6 notes, Hi Ho Silver! – so far so good.

Here’s the commercial:

There’s also a series of behind the scenes clips which are interesting.

However, after all the time and money that went into this, THE INTERVALS ARE WRONG! AHHH! It’s grating! (ha). All the notes are in the key of F Major, but the first leap should be a fourth, instead of a third.

Correct: F-Bb-C-D or Do Fa So La or 1-4-5-6
Actual: F-A-Bb-C or Do Mi Fa So or 1-3-4-5

The rest of the song is similarly flat – scalewise compared to the starting note – until the last five notes which are spot on. I guess when all was said and done they figured they were close enough. That the vast majority of people wouldn’t notice and definitely wouldn’t be offended unless they had a ridiculous obsession with the science of music.

But, how can you spend that much time and money on a project and end up with the wrong notes? The tune has been the same for 180 years! They have a “musician/mathematician” on the project! They did calculations! In spreadsheets! Twelveth root of two and all that jazz (see: equal temperment). Watching these videos is bittersweet because I LOVE the concept and the passion that went into the project. I think working on this would have been the best job ever.

The funniest part of the videos is when the people who drove over the road sing the song themselves and do it the correct way without realizing the difference. And it’s not just the speed of the car that makes it wrong. Trust me, I’ve spent way too much time thinking about this.

They say in the videos that the mechanical cuts in the road are similar to how a CD is made. More like vinyl perhaps, since CDs are a complicated encoding of digital bit strings that don’t translate in the mechanical world. Furthermore, CDs have built in error correction. Snap.

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Bonus Jonas. If you’ve never seen “Cog” it’s an incredible 2 minute Honda commercial of a Rube Goldberg machine made entirely of car parts that actually achieves its goal. I hope the guys who designed this were as psyched when it finally worked after 600 tries as the people on the musical road were when it almost sounded right. Some of this stuff looks impossible. Some explanations – the tires are weighted, the windshield wiper system automatically reacts to rain (still not sure how it shuts off) and the only thing faked is that the room wasn’t big enough so they filmed it in two halves.