Практика Shadowing: Why California's musical road sounds terrible - Изучайте разговорный английский по видео

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If you drive down a certain stretch of highway in the California desert, you will hear music.
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It's supposed to sound a little bit like this.
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But instead, it sounds like this.
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That was the musical road of Lancaster, California, and as you may have heard, it's a little bit out of tune.
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A lot of money was spent on that road.
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It was a publicity stunt for a car company who wanted to show off how clever they are.
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And doing the calculations for something like that isn't really difficult.
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A musical note is a vibration in the air at a particular frequency, and those vibrations can be made by a violin string or synthesized by a computer,
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or, in this case, made by vehicle tyres hitting grooves in the road.
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The closer the grooves are, the faster the vibrations, and the higher the note.
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So take the speed limit, divide by the frequency of the note you want, and that's how often there should be a groove in the road.
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And if people travel at the wrong speed, well, it shouldn't really matter.
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It'll just be like slowing down or speeding up any other bit of music.
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It'll be in the wrong key, but it'll still sound right to most people's ears.
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It won't sound like that mess.
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So, what went wrong?
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At this point, I'm indebted to David Simmons Duffin, an assistant professor of physics at Caltech, whose interests include quantum field theories and playing Baroque violin,
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because he was, as far as I can tell, the very first person to figure out what went wrong.
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And the problem was probably the English language.
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Whoever did the calculations said that the grooves should be so far apart, let's say four inches for the first note, and they meant that there should be a groove every four inches.
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But whoever gave the instructions to the work crew said that the grooves should be four inches apart,
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and that was interpreted as four inches between the end of one groove and the start of the next one.
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itself.
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But your ears definitely do include it.
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The highest note on that section of the William Tell Overture should be one octave higher than the lowest.
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That means the frequency should be doubled and the grooves should be half the distance apart.
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And they are if you don't include the width of the groove itself.
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That error means that every note is distorted not by a fraction of its value, like if you're travelling at the wrong speed, but by a constant amount, by the width of the grooves.
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The higher the note, the greater the effect of that distortion.
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And the result is the mess that you are about to hear for a second time.
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And the really strange part?
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This is the second musical road built in Lancaster, California.
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The first one, built by the car company, was too close to residents who complained about the constant noise, and probably this note here.
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So the city paved over it and rebuilt it to the exact same wrong blueprints.
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That's a take.
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That is a take right there.
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And in order to celebrate that take, I'm going to put my foot down.
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This is an SUV.
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It doesn't do that.

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