Sound and silence play large roles in the organisation of social and culture life. How you react to loud music, for example, helps you negotiate your identity. But when were you last confronted with silence? Perhaps when you last saw an electric car you will have noticed the absence of sound, the absence of engine noise. Right now, sound engineers work on shaping how electric vehicles communicate their presence to their surroundings. There’s basically two major lines of thinking:
- to replicate the sound of the internal combustion engine
- to construct a new sonic palette, a different set of sonic properties, that we will learn to recognize as vehicles in the future
To see how electric cars should sound in the future I will first look back at how the first engineers worked on the inevitable sonic power of the car. I will then look at what experiments engineers and composers at Audi work on to shape the future sound of cars. In both past and future the role of marketing shapes the tensions between car makers and everyday citizens.
The introduction of the car into everyday life
When the first cars started appearing on the roads in the late nineteenth Century, their noise and speed were the most common elements local governments sought to regulate. The very first cars were actually often electric, but the combustion engine soon won out due to cost and availability. The car’s entry into the, mostly, urban spaces around the turn of twentieth century spooked pedestrians and horses alike. To notify other road users drivers had to use a horn:
“The driver has to give a clearly audible signal to approaching traffic and traffic to be overtaken, as well as to people who cross paths with the vehicle in order to make known that he is coming … In the same way, a signal needs to be given at street junctions and at the passing of bridges, gates and narrow streets, when turning into street corners, when coming out of or driving into premises located at public roads, and also at all unclear places and passages.”
Police notice, Düsseldorf (1901)
In other words, even if the vehicle was electric it still had to honk its horn basically all the time. Yet the regulation is understandable as the sound of a horn extended the acoustic horizon of the car. Using it allowed people and horses to adjust to the oncoming vehicle even if it was still out of sight.
That horses were such an important part of this discussion was because they featured so prominently in the streets around the turn of the twentieth century. Moreover, there was no scientific method for measuring sound yet – the decibel’s introduction came in 1925. If a horse shied away from the car and its sounds those sounds became noise.
The first ‘silent’ combustion engine
Horse owners tried to accustom their horses to early motoring by bringing them out purposefully during, for example, a celebratory tour in England in 1900. However, car makers saw opportunities to differentiate themselves with quiet engines. One correspondent for The Lancet in 1900 noted that:
“the petroleumdriven motor cars are still noisy, yet earnest attempts have evidently been made to remove this reproach.”
‘Celebration of the Four Year Anniversary of the “Locomotives on Highways” Act,’ The Lancet, 17 November 1900
Just a few years later, Daimler-Knight put out the first engine that they marketed as being ‘silent.’ It did this by removing lots of parts from the engine and adding sleeves around the cylinders.
Of course, to our ears now this engine doesn’t sound silent at all.
The sound in the early twentieth century would have been muffled a bit more by virtue of it being covered by a hood, but that’s not a ‘silent’ engine. More interesting than the actual sound, however, is that both engineers and marketeers had an interest to create cars as quiet participants in a modernising everyday life. ‘Silence’ was both a product and a marketable feature.
The electric vehicle and the sound of the future
The electric vehicle is making a big comeback, mainly supported by narratives of sustainability. Unlike 130 years ago, however, our current everyday life is often shaped by the sounds of cars and their combustion engines. By comparison electric vehicles are quiet threats that nobody hears coming. The Knight engine in 1908 signaled a new era where car makers focused on making their vehicles quiet companions for pedestrians and horses. Conversely, car makers now face questions about how to create audible companions for other street users. Not only, then, is this a question of how electric cars can sound, but also how our streetscapes can sound.
To prevent, for example, visually impaired people to step in front of a quiet electric car, the European Commission mandated use of what’s called the Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System. The thinking behind this system is that cars should increase noise when they speed up and give off warning signs in the form of noises [think a car driving backwards and beeping] when going slower than 20km [14 miles] per hour. This is often done by mimicking the sounds of cars as we’re used to them.
Renzo Vitale, Hans Zimmer & Audi
But there’s another way to adhere to these regulations and in the process reshape our soundscapes. Instead of focusing on the sounds of the combustion engine as we know them, there’s an opportunity for composers and audio engineers to think about the effects of the car and its sound on our everyday environments. Just like Daimler-Knight made silence into a marketable feature for cars, Audio is making composed sound a marketable feature. One of the main audio engineers involved is Renzo Vitale and he explained the thinking behind it in a TED talk.
The key aspect to take away from this talk is that he sees the car as a sonic organism which has to bring its own auditory properties into contact with the broader soundscape. This research eventually led Vitale and Audi to work together with composer Hans Zimmer on the sounds for the Audi i4.
It’s important to cut through the marketingspeak of this video, but the actual sound of the car is interesting. Instead of turning towards those well-worn sounds of combustion engines, or even Star Wars podraces, this is musical. The accelerating car reminds me of an orchestra tuning before the conductor comes on stage. The sounds that signal movement, such as starting the car, are brief musical shots instead of beeps. It draws on a very different set of connotations for our brains, much more focused on harmony than those sounds of the combustion engine.
Towards a future soundscape of harmony
Cars will remain a part of the hubbub of everyday life, but the sonic technologies involved in electric vehicles raise questions and provide opportunities to compose our auditory lives. What would it mean to start composing our soundscapes more like symphonies? Will that create more harmonic living environments in which all the various elements work together as sonic textures like violins and horns in an orchestra? As long as it doesn’t become a cacophony of individuality but something put together with an overarching score it might just be a very pleasant future to listen to and dwell in.