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Soundtrack: Platform, by Holly Herndon (Wikipedia, official page)
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I hadn't visited Amsterdam in years. My previous attempt, last year, was thwarted by covid.
This time, what surprised me most was the number of electric cars and charging points in the city.
Especially Teslas.
Perhaps the small size of the country allows their battery range to be sufficient for comfortable travel throughout it. Or due to the ecological awareness of the Dutch. Or, simply, because they have high purchasing power (a Tesla Model 3 costs €52,000).
However, contrary to what I've read about sound design for automobiles, I never perceived these vehicles emitting a specific sound.
Maybe I wasn't paying enough attention; it might still be being implemented; or perhaps the sound of combustion engines drowned out the rest.
But I did notice a substantial change in the sound of electric cars compared to where I live, and that difference comes from the pavement. In Amsterdam cobblestones are common and cars produce a very characteristic sound when driving over them, whether electric or not.
This acoustic effect is well known, there are even roads that take advantage of it to play melodies.
This gave me a lot to think about, especially about what will happen when several cars from different companies travel together in an urban environment (highways deserve different treatment).
If the sounds don't match in pitch, dissonances can occur (for example, a C and a D sounding simultaneously). This would lead to harmonic chaos, with the consequent generation of stress and psychological tension for pedestrians.
I made a small mix overlapping the sounds of the Renault ZOE and the Jaguar I-Pace (with sound design by Richard Devine):
I have the feeling that, driven by the need to sell the utopia narrative, car manufacturers are forgetting about the sound impact they will have in urban environments.
That they are designing sounds ignoring the context.
This approach will produce an emotional and psychological disconnection between what is perceived visually and acoustically. There is a dissonance, in this case cognitive, between the landscape and the sound.
We are neither in Blade Runner, nor in I, Robot.
We live in all kinds of cities, whether Tokyo or Allariz.
To give an example, would you like this intersection to sound like this?
Montage of a video by Mikhail Fesenko with Richard Devine's sound for the Jaguar I-Pace superimposed.
But not only car manufacturers, but also design studios like Pentagram resort to similar approaches.
What seems quite clear is that no one finds an optimal solution. Especially when Tesla allows its drivers to choose the sound:
Contrary to what the man in the video says at second 13, NO, Tesla does not have the solution, in that case it wouldn't transfer the problem to its users.
I'll stick with this section from the Model S manual:
Fortunately, the NHTSA has already forced Tesla to remove some of its sound features.
Anyway, even if those options are banned or eliminated, there will always be someone who hacks the system, just like some drivers change the exhaust pipe for a louder one.
And, honestly, I wouldn't want a soundscape dominated by the owners of these cars:
A company shouldn't decide how a city is going to sound. Users shouldn't either.
Should Madrid and Kuala Lumpur sound the same? New York and Santiago de Compostela?
The acoustic landscape of a city is a political decision.
Would it be appropriate for car sounds to change based on the area they're traveling through?
Why not make the context modify the vehicle's sound?
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I had been thinking for quite a few days about what an electric car should sound like and how GPS data could modulate it.
Today, while having breakfast, I remembered that Holly Herndon was designing sound for electric cars. I searched for information about what she proposes and found a fantastic interview at the Red Bull Academy.
And from which I take this part, with which I couldn't agree more:
Question: So your car when you're driving to the shop is supposed to sound like a spacecraft?
Holly Herndon: That's what the idea has been, that was the grand idea but I think that's a really boring solution to what could be basically any kind of sound. So I was working with this company called Semcon, and we presented at the Frankfurt Motor Show last year, which was a really unusual venue for me to be showing stuff. Basically, we came up with some different options for what an electric car could sound like and when you turn your wheel how could you play your car, and how your car could be an instrument in that way. One of the ideas that we came up with was to have a microphone system that would pull in the sound of the city wherever you were. Then it could process that, and then that could be a part of it, so it wouldn't just be like a one-fit solution for every city. I think urban sound planning and things like that are really interesting.