Put the Needle on the Freeway
Highway Needles is an artistic-mechanical concept born from one question: What if we could listen to the roads? Inspired by turntables and vinyl grooves, this project imagined traffic as sheet music, cars as notes, and lanes as staves.
The concept was to install light-based sensors on both sides of an overpass to "read" traffic movement, translating vehicle positions and speeds into audio frequencies. One lane = one note. Car lengths = note durations. Small cars are eighths, trucks are whole notes. A flowing freeway becomes a score. Random? Yes. But maybe randomly beautiful.
It's a soundscape of modern life-replacing the whizz of engines with musical tone. Rush hour might sound like a jazz riff. Midnight on I-5? Sparse ambient pulses. It was part experiment, part dream, and totally impractical. Building it would've meant permits, funding, and infrastructure battles. So the idea lives here now. Documented. Filed under abandoned, but poetic.
