“I’m driving in a black on black in black Porsche 924.” With these words in his classic 1985 track, “Night Drive (Thru-Babylon),” Juan Atkins made explicit the nascent connection between techno and cars.
It was not unprecedented. The first major piece of electronic pop music, Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn,” was about driving down the highway, and Gary Numan evoked cars as safe spaces in his landmark “Cars.”
But Atkins, recording as Model 500, connected the dots between the Detroit automobile assembly lines, the man/machine fusion of the automobile, and techno production, itself a kind of cyborg relationship between musician and electronic instrument.
The Sound of Silence
With the rise in popularity of electric vehicles (EV), car manufacturers are taking the opportunity to redefine the sound of the automobile. Aside from tires rolling on pavement, EV are almost completely quiet. There’s no engine noise because there’s no combustion engine. Because of various safety concerns, EV are required to make some kind of sound to alert pedestrians to their presence. Just what form that sound will take, however, is up to the companies themselves.
While some manufacturers have stuck with the old script, synthesizing the sound of old-school engines, others are getting more creative. There are cars with samples of the human voice as part of the ‘engine’ noise. Another incorporates a didgeridoo. These are not machine sounds but essentially human sounds. And the people championing this redefinition of how a car should sound are often electronic musicians.
The Challenge of Electric
Richard Devine straddles two worlds. He’s known as a musician but he’s also a sound designer. This includes cars. He’s lent his talents to Jaguar, on the C-X75 prototype and I-PACE, working on both engine and interior sounds.
“I use many applications (for sound design),” Richard explains, “but for these projects, I used mostly digital synthesis-based systems like Symbolic Sound’s Kyma, a hardware and software environment for creative sound design, live performance, and scientific exploration, and other programs like Spear (Sinusoidal Partial Editing Analysis and Resynthesis).”
While Kyma and SPEAR are high-end, professional applications (sound designers have long used Kyma in major Hollywood films, for example), Richard also employed software that we as electronic music producers will know: Max/MSP and Native Instruments Reaktor. “I also used Max/MSP and Reaktor a bit in the design phase, as most of what I had to design was based on additive synthesis. Furthermore, I needed to reproduce specific harmonics and the easiest way to do that was a combination of real-time synthesis, resynthesis, and additive synthesis.” Yes, there are Reaktor and Max/MSP sounds in Jaguar cars. (...)
As cars are dynamic, the sound engine has to be as well.
The sound design is more involved than just chucking a few waveforms into a sample player. Cars are almost like instruments; they respond dynamically to the driver and provide immediate feedback.“ The system used a combination of samples and real-time synthesis to be played and controlled by the user as they would press the acceleration pedal,” explains Richard. “I spent many months analyzing the sound of previous Jaguar combustion-based engines. I did a harmonic analysis study of those engine recordings so I could take a bit of the past and incorporate that sound into the new system. It still had that signature purr of an older Jaguar that the customers had been accustomed to but with an updated, futuristic sound.”
by Adam Douglas, Attack | Read more:
Image: Richard Devine
[ed. Probably like the difference between real drumming and a drum machine.]
