[AutonomousVehicles] From the New Yorker: Annals of Sound

[Angela Daniel]

Thank you Brian. Words of wisdom. I'm so thankful for the work that we do.

Best regards, Angela Daniel

On Wed, Aug 3, 2022, 3:54 AM Brian Buhrow via AutonomousVehicles <
autonomousvehicles at nfbnet.org> wrote:

>         hello.  At first, this message might seem off topic for this list,
> but autonomous vehicles
> and quiet cars go hand in hand by virtue of the fact  that it is expected
> that autonomous vehicles
> will deploy many
> of the same propulsion technologies hybrid and electric cars do, thus
> making them quiet cars on
> our streets and highways.
>
> The article below, link and text included, tells the story of the
> Pedestrian Safety Enhancement
> Act, including the NFB's part in that story.  Many of us spent many years
> working to get that
> legislation passed and the regulations which implement it written.  It is
> work we should be
> proud of and for those folks who have come to the NFB since the bulk of
> this work was done,
> they should know about our involvement in this very important component of
> our ability to
> travel safely on our streets amidst these electric vehicles.  Work like
> this is why I am a
> Federationist and why our work is so important to the lives of blind
> people.  Sometimes what we
> do affects only a few blind folks, and sometimes it affects many,
> including those who are not
> blind.  I'm proud of both the big and small things we do, but I want to
> make sure everyone
> knows about the big ones so we don't forget they exist.
>
> -Brian
>
>
>
> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/08/what-should-a-nine-thousand-pound-electric-vehicle-sound-like?campaign_id=4&emc=edit_dk_20220802&instance_id=68225&nl=dealbook&regi_id=27757237&segment_id=100212&te=1&user_id=cfbe3c49635d1550df5aa13245dda31d
>
>    Annals of Sound
>    August 8, 2022 Issue
>
> What Should a Nine-Thousand-Pound Electric Vehicle Sound Like?
>
>    E.V.s are virtually silent, so acoustic designers are creating alerts
> for them. A
>    symphony--or a cacophony--of car noise could be coming to city streets.
>
>    By John Seabrook
>
>    August 1, 2022
>
>    I sleep on the second floor, in a bedroom facing a residential street
> in Brooklyn. Through
>    the years, my sleeping brain has grown used to the nighttime noises of
> motor vehicles:
>    mainly the growls of engines, but also the squeaks of truck springs
> wheezing over the
>    street's speed hump, and the wheedling of open-door chimes from
> late-night Uber drop-offs.
>
>    Fire engines, cop cars, unmuffled Harley-Davidson motorcycles, not to
> mention unhappy
>    couples arguing and the occasional lost soul screaming at ghosts--none
> of that noise
>    bothers me. On my first night in the country, however, I'm like Joe
> Pesci in "My Cousin
>    Vinny," trying to sleep in rural Alabama: "What the fuck is that?"
>
>    Unlike vision, smell, and taste, all of which dim when consciousness
> shuts down for the
>    night, hearing is a 24/7 operation. For early humans, who were trying
> to rest outdoors with
>    predators around, this trait was presumably a lifesaver. For people
> trying to sleep in the
>    city that never does, though, all-night listening is mostly a
> liability. The brain must
>    disregard a lot of ordinary metropolitan white noise, while remaining
> alert to unusual
>    sounds that might be of vital importance. The waking brain performs a
> similar filtering
>    function in the urban soundscape, ignoring as many of the meaningless
> noises as possible.
>
>    Researchers into the neurobiology of hearing explain this phenomenon in
> terms of novelty
>    and adaptation. Familiar and regularly patterned sounds, such as
> internal-combustion
>    engines and air-conditioners, don't wake us; a new or irregular
> disturbance stands out, at
>    least at first, amid the sonic clutter. In a 2005 paper, Ellen Covey, a
> psychologist at the
>    University of Washington, and her co-authors identified these
> subconscious arbiters of
>    sound and noise as the brain's "novelty detector neurons."
>
>    But a novel or useful alert can become a meaningless repetitive noise
> over time. The
>    beeping emitted by the new Walk / Don't Walk signals, which were
> recently installed on the
>    corners of my block, initially struck me as abrasive; now I tune it
> out. Other, more
>    aggressive sounds, such as back-up beepers on trucks, have been
> designed to resist
>    assimilation, because that would diminish their efficacy as audible
> beacons. Far from
>    blending together into a kind of acoustic ecosystem, city noises tend
> to compete with one
>    another to be heard--an auditory cage match wherein the loudest sound
> eventually wins.
>
>    The electrification of mobility presents humanity with a rare
> opportunity to reimagine the
>    way cities might sound. Electric motorcycles, cars, trucks, and vans
> are legally mandated
>    to replace all internal-combustion-engine (I.C.E.) vehicles in New
> York, L.A., and other
>    cities by mid-century--a shift that will profoundly alter the acoustic
> texture of urban
>    life. The internal-combustion engine, in addition to being the single
> largest source of
>    CO[2] emissions, is the leading cause of global noise pollution, which
> studies have shown
>    to have a similarly corrosive effect on human health. When moving at
> higher speeds,
>    electric vehicles, or E.V.s, produce roughly the same wind and road
> noise that I.C.E.
>    vehicles do, but at lower speeds they operate in near-silence:
> electricity flows from the
>    battery to the motor, which spins with a barely audible hum. Therein
> lie the promise and
>    the peril of E.V.s for city dwellers.
>
>    A zero-emissions vehicle has obvious benefits for the environment, but
> a quiet car is a
>    mixed blessing for the public good. Automobile engines, however
> annoying non-driving
>    citizens find them, are rich in information, providing a protective web
> of sound that
>    cushions us from collisions as we navigate the streets. Not only does
> engine noise announce
>    a vehicle's presence; it can also convey its direction, its speed, and
> whether it is
>    accelerating or decelerating. The same disturbances that my brain
> ignores while I'm
>    sleeping help guide me when I'm cycling in traffic and can't take my
> eyes off the road to
>    glance back. And, for pedestrians distracted by their phones, engine
> sounds are everyday
>    lifesavers, as the tiger's distant roar was for napping early humans.
> Except that the
>    predators are motor vehicles--and the new ones are virtually silent.
>
>    In response to this threat, Congress passed the 2010 Pedestrian Safety
> Enhancement Act, a
>    law that few Americans paid attention to at the time, and that took
> almost ten years to
>    implement. As a result of the legislation, every E.V. and hybrid
> manufactured since 2020
>    and sold in the U.S. must come equipped with a pedestrian-warning
> system, also known as an
>    acoustic vehicle alerting system (AVAS), which emits noises from
> external speakers when the
>    car is travelling below eighteen and a half miles per hour. (Similar
> regulations apply in
>    Europe and Asia.)
>
>    Automakers have enlisted musicians and composers to assist in crafting
> pleasing and
>    proprietary alert systems, as well as in-cabin chimes and tones. Hans
> Zimmer, the film
>    composer, was involved in scoring branded sounds for BMW's Vision M
> Next car. The
>    Volkswagen ID.3's sound was created by Leslie Mándoki, a
> German-Hungarian
>    prog-rock/jazz-adjacent producer. The Atlanta-based electronic musician
> Richard Devine was
>    brought in to help in making the Jaguar I-Pace's voltaic purr. Some
> automakers cooked up
>    sounds entirely in-house. The Porsche Taycan Turbo S has one of the
> boldest alerts: you're
>    in Dr. Frankenstein's lab as he flips the switch to animate the
> monster. Engineers in the
>    Audi Sound Lab made the lower frequencies of the Audi E-Tron GT
> Quattro's alert by
>    algorithmically mixing different tones produced by recording an
> electric fan through a long
>    metal pipe; the full alert references the sumptuous soundscapes of the
> film "Tron" and its
>    sequel.
>
>    Other alerts tilt more toward nature. Danni Venne, the head designer
> behind the Nissan
>    Leaf's Canto sound palette, said in a Business Insider video that "you
> really have to go
>    for instruments that don't have a hard attack to them. Wind
> instruments, flutes, oboes,
>    clarinets . . . can kind of waver a bit." Elon Musk has suggested that
> Teslas could make
>    goat noises, or, perhaps, clopping-coconut sounds, like those made by
> the crusaders in
>    "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" because they lack actual steeds.
>
>    Only one in twenty new cars sold in the U.S. is an E.V., so these
> alerts are still a rarity
>    in New York, but one day everyone will live with them. I'm already
> wondering how I'm going
>    to sleep.
>
>    It took a lot of effort to make naturally quiet vehicles noisier. The
> campaign that led to
>    the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act began at the grassroots level.
> One November morning
>    in 2003, a friend dropped by the Illinois home of Deborah Kent Stein, a
> blind writer and an
>    activist with the National Federation of the Blind, or N.F.B. The
> friend wanted to show
>    Stein and her family his new Toyota Prius, a hybrid vehicle. "It's
> completely silent when
>    it's running on its battery," he announced. "No kidding--you can't hear
> a thing."
>
>    Stein later described this fateful encounter with the automotive future
> in an essay she
>    published on the N.F.B.'s Web site:
>
>    Two men in togas walk through Pompeii as Mount Vesuvius erupts
>    "I'm really trying not to freak out about every little cataclysm."
>      *
>      *
>      *
>      *
>
>    Cartoon by Lars Kenseth
>
>    I stood at the curb and listened as our friend climbed into the
> driver's seat and slammed
>    the door. I waited to hear the Prius hum into life and move forward. I
> heard the chatter of
>    sparrows; the distant roar of a leaf blower; and, after a minute or
> two, the opening of the
>    car door.
>
>    "When are you going to start?" I asked.
>
>    "I did start," our friend answered. "I drove down to the end of the
> block, and then I
>    backed past you and drove up in front of you again." I felt a cold
> sense of dread. I
>    thought, we've got a real problem.
>
>    A few years later, Lawrence D. Rosenblum, a professor of psychology at
> the University of
>    California, Riverside, read something about the danger of quiet cars.
> He had done acoustic
>    research showing that the brain pays special attention to sounds moving
> toward the
>    listener, automatically calculating what Rosenblum calls
> "time-to-arrival." He published an
>    account of his work in a 2010 book, "See What I'm Saying: The
> Extraordinary Powers of Our
>    Five Senses."
>
>    With a grant from the N.F.B., Rosenblum set up an experiment in which
> blindfolded subjects
>    stood next to a roadway and listened as both a gas-powered Honda Civic
> and a hybrid Prius
>    running on its battery drove past. Subjects were told to press buttons
> on a device to
>    indicate when they could hear a vehicle and to identify its direction.
> The results,
>    Rosenblum told me, "couldn't have been clearer. People could hear the
> Honda when it was
>    still twenty feet away, whereas they couldn't hear the Prius until it
> had passed them."
>
>    At its headquarters, in Baltimore, the N.F.B. established a committee
> to investigate the
>    problem of quiet cars. Discussions were held with automotive regulators
> and auto-industry
>    engineers. "Smart" solutions were proposed involving sensors, cameras,
> and in-cabin alerts
>    that would warn an E.V.'s driver of an impending collision. The sonic
> plague of back-up
>    beepers unleashed by Ed Peterson's mid-sixties invention, the
> Bac-A-Larm, has been tempered
>    by back-up cameras in newer trucks and vans, which warn only the
> driver, and not the rest
>    of the street, if someone is behind the vehicle. Couldn't E.V. alert
> systems work
>    similarly, especially with the proliferation of sensors and cameras in
> the latest models?
>    But the blind community strongly opposed that approach, in part because
> it was predicated
>    on an imminent collision, rather than on preventing such incidents from
> occurring in the
>    first place.
>
>    At one meeting, an automotive engineer made a suggestion. Since
> maximum-noise laws for
>    gas-powered automobiles already existed, why not establish a
> minimum-noise standard that
>    E.V.s had to meet? "It was a revolutionary idea," Stein wrote.
>
>    But, in order to convince Congress to consider a law requiring a
> minimum-noise standard,
>    the N.F.B. needed data. And in the nineties and early two-thousands,
> with so few hybrids
>    and E.V.s on the road, the number of accidents involving pedestrians,
> visually impaired or
>    not, was statistically negligible. The N.F.B. did collect many
> anecdotal reports about
>    close calls, and even accounts of minor injuries. "But anecdotal
> evidence isn't statistical
>    engineering evidence," John Paré, the N.F.B.'s executive director for
> advocacy and policy,
>    who served as the national coördinator of the campaign against quiet
> cars, told me.
>
>    Without real-world data proving that quiet cars could be dangerous, the
> National Highway
>    Traffic Safety Administration, the federal agency charged with reducing
> deaths, injuries,
>    and economic losses on the nation's roadways, could do nothing. The
> breakthrough came later
>    in the decade, when the N.H.T.S.A. investigated crash rates for hybrids
> and E.V.s in
>    incidents involving sighted pedestrians and cyclists, and compared
> those with crash rates
>    for I.C.E. vehicles in similar incidents. The results, which were
> published in a 2009
>    report, based on limited data from 2000 to 2007, showed that hybrids
> and E.V.s were twice
>    as likely as I.C.E. vehicles to be involved in accidents with
> pedestrians. A follow-up
>    report in October, 2011, using a larger sample size, found that hybrids
> and E.V.s had a
>    thirty-five per cent greater likelihood of accidents with pedestrians,
> and a fifty per cent
>    greater likelihood of accidents with cyclists. Most of these incidents
> occurred not on the
>    road but in parking lots and driveways, when a driver was reversing or
> turning.
>
>    The Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act, calling for a "sound or set of
> sounds for all
>    vehicles of the same make and model," was passed in the last hours of
> the 111th Congress,
>    and President Barack Obama signed it into law on January 4, 2011. The
> Act did not specify
>    what those alerts should sound like. That question took six years for
> the N.H.T.S.A. to
>    resolve, and resulted in three hundred and seventy-two pages of mostly
> numerical acoustic
>    rules and parameters. What took so long?
>
>    "We thought that they had to sound to some degree like cars--otherwise,
> the alerts won't
>    provide safety," Paré told me. "Society has already been trained to
> know what cars sound
>    like." However, he added, "it's really hard to specify what a car
> sounds like. How do you
>    put into regulatory legal language that a car should sound like a car?"
>
>    Many electrical appliances make sounds, although few are scored by
> famous composers. My
>    family's seven-piece kitchen ensemble, for example--dishwasher,
> electric oven, microwave,
>    refrigerator and freezer, electric kettle, and coffee maker--creates a
> discordant symphony
>    of simple beeps, tones, and chimes of clashing frequencies and rhythms
> throughout the day
>    to inform us when the machines have begun or completed the particular
> tasks they were
>    designed for. An acoustic ecosystem it's not.
>
>    Electric vehicles offer a vast new stage for sound designers, both
> inside and outside the
>    vehicles. As sensors, computer vision, and cloud-based algorithms take
> over more and more
>    of the driving, sound will become a user's primary interface with such
> machines. If a car
>    can drive, its user won't need to look up from her book or wake from a
> nap unless there's
>    an audible alert. Many newer cars, outfitted with semi-autonomous
> features that assist a
>    driver in adjusting the speed or changing lanes, already make in-cabin
> sounds when they
>    perform these actions, mainly to reassure the driver and any passengers
> that the vehicle is
>    executing a plan, and not just randomly drifting. (In psychoacoustic
> research, these are
>    known as "priming" sounds.) There are also more urgent
> collision-avoidance alerts, should a
>    car's cameras or sensors detect objects close by.
>
>    Nicolas Misdariis is the head of the Sound Perception and Design group
> at the Institute for
>    Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM), in Paris, a world
> center of
>    psychoacoustic research. Since 2008, his team has worked with the
> Renault Group, designing
>    sounds for the French automaker's lineup of electric cars, both
> prototypes and vehicles in
>    production.
>
>    IRCAM's office is next to the Pompidou Center, in Paris's Fourth
> Arrondissement, and as I
>    walked there one day in February to visit Misdariis I kept mostly to
> the streets, because
>    the narrow sidewalks were overflowing with pedestrians and
> electric-scooter riders. I
>    listened to the whine of diesel-fuelled cars and the whokada-whokada of
> two-stroke mopeds
>    behind me--engines that give European cities a different audible flavor
> from American urban
>    environments--in order to know when to get out of the way. The only
> close calls I had were
>    with the shareable e-bikes that Paris, like New York, has embraced
> since the pandemic.
>    E-bikes are not legally required to emit sounds when
> moving--yet--although some proactively
>    do.
>
>    When the researchers first began working with Renault, Misdariis told
> me, the collaborators
>    struggled to find a common language in which to talk about acoustic
> design. "When a graphic
>    designer says to you, `This is a red triangle,' there is no different
> interpretation
>    possible," he said. "But if you say, `I would like a warm sound'--what
> is a warm sound?
>    What is a round sound? What is a rough sound? A green sound? What is a
> smiling sound? We
>    know what happy music is, but what is a two-second sound that is
> happy?" Misdariis added,
>    "It is the sound designer's job to translate high-level visual
> representations into sound
>    parameters--this is a very tricky point of our discipline." The Renault
> team eventually
>    developed tools for visually sketching sounds, frequencies, and
> modulations. "We needed
>    these tools to create efficient sound design," he said.
>
>    The IRCAM researchers also investigated fundamental issues such as
> whether E.V. sounds
>    should be sonic metaphors for the noise of internal combustion, similar
> to a cell phone's
>    synthetic bell or the reassuring paper-crumpling that indicates you've
> discarded a document
>    on your MacBook--a form of acoustic design known as skeuomorphism.
> Another option was to
>    use "ear-cons"--audible symbols, such as the abstract clicks a Geiger
> counter makes, which
>    everyone recognizes as the sign of radioactivity. Misdariis's team
> developed and tested
>    options in both categories. They discovered, he said, that "metaphors
> are easy to
>    understand but hard to remember, whereas symbols are harder to
> understand but easier to
>    imprint."
>
>    The IRCAM team worked with Andrea Cera, an Italian music producer and
> composer. Cera said
>    that he views the electrification of mobility as a chance to
> fundamentally rethink the
>    chaotic acoustics of a city. He envisions an urban soundscape modelled
> on birdsong in
>    nature, in which, instead of competing to be heard, different sounds
> fit into an over-all
>    acoustic ecosystem. By analyzing soundscapes around the world, Cera
> told me, he has
>    identified "these little niches where you could put a little sound so
> that you could be
>    present without being loud. Just a tone, not a melody." The sounds he
> and the IRCAM team
>    have designed for Renault aim to complement those niches. He added, "If
> the soundscape is
>    very chaotic--cars, phones, horns, radios--the best way to be noticed
> is to be still."
>
>    IRCAM's Renault sounds were, indeed, surprisingly mellow, although
> perhaps less like
>    birdsong than like a washing machine set to the delicates cycle. The
> Parisian soundscape
>    will surely benefit from them. But would anyone hear these élégantes
> French alerts in New
>    York, particularly over the bedlam and blare of all the gas-powered
> vehicles in its
>    traffic-clogged streets?
>
>    An automobile powered by internal combustion makes a racket. The
> induction of air, its
>    compression inside the piston sleeves, the explosion of the vaporized
> gasoline, and the
>    expulsion of CO[2] exhaust ("suck, squeeze, bang, and blow," in car
> talk) produce loud,
>    low-frequency reports, rumbles, and vibrations.
>
>    At General Motors, engineers in the Noise and Vibration Center are
> responsible for
>    fine-tuning that din. Douglas Moore, a senior expert in exterior noise
> at G.M., started
>    working at the company in 1984, when he was still an undergraduate at
> Michigan State. He
>    has spent all but eight years of his career with G.M., where his job,
> and that of his Noise
>    and Vibration colleagues, has been to silence, dampen, and modulate the
> sounds made by
>    internal combustion, depending on the brand. Traditionally, when tuning
> a Cadillac, Moore
>    and his colleagues would try to make the engine as quiet as possible,
> because quiet
>    signifies luxury to the classic Cadillac buyer. In tuning a Corvette,
> Chevrolet's "muscle
>    car," on the other hand, the engineers want some of the bang-bang-bang
> of internal
>    combustion to come through, because that conveys power to the driver.
>
>    The engine's sound isn't the only thing that the engineers work on.
> Many prospective
>    buyers' first experience of a car or a truck is the CLICK ker-CHUNK
> that the driver's-side
>    door makes when they close it, followed by a faint harmonic shiver
> given off by the
>    vehicle's metal skin. The door's weight, latches, and seals are
> carefully calibrated to
>    create a psychoacoustic experience that conveys comfort, safety, and
> manufacturing
>    expertise.
>
>    In designing electric versions of popular brands, U.S. automakers have
> to decide whether to
>    make the E.V.s mimic their gas-driven counterparts or whether, like
> Renault, to divert from
>    the familiar sound. The Passenger Safety Enhancement Act directives
> allow automakers to
>    craft their own branded alerts, so long as they meet certain
> specifications.
>
>    Moore's first E.V. project was the 2012 Chevy Volt, which emitted a
> pedestrian alert years
>    before the law required one--a vacuum-cleaner-like hum that increased
> in frequency as the
>    car sped up. "I have new colors to paint with," Moore said. "Instead of
> a palette of
>    internal-combustion sounds, I have a palette of AVAS sounds. But it's
> the same approach.
>    Now, instead of generating them with the physical components of the
> car, which has its pros
>    and cons, we're generating them electronically."
>
>    Moore is also the longtime chair of a group within the Society of
> Automotive Engineers
>    called the Light Vehicle Exterior Sound Level Standards Committee,
> which helps develop
>    tests that regulators use to measure safety on the road in the U.S. His
> group led the
>    investigation into developing minimum-sound standards for E.V.s and
> hybrids, and
>    establishing parameters to govern the decibel level, pitch, and
> morphology of the warning
>    signals. Moore once came to the N.F.B. headquarters and tried
> navigating in traffic when
>    blindfolded. His N.F.B. instructor was impressed that the engineer
> could identify a 2005
>    Chevrolet Camaro and a 2009 Cadillac Escalade by their distinctive
> engine sounds.
>
>    Moore explained the S.A.E.'s relationship with federal highway-safety
> regulators by saying,
>    "We figure out how to measure things. N.H.T.S.A. says how much." I
> asked Moore why the
>    regulations don't require that E.V.s more closely resemble I.C.E.
> vehicles, since, as the
>    N.F.B.'s John Paré had noted to me, we're already used to those noises.
> Moore replied, "The
>    purpose of this sound is to provide information about what the vehicle
> is doing. And
>    there's more than one way to provide that." He paused. "Yes, we've
> learned
>    internal-combustion sounds over a hundred years," he continued. "But
> before cars were
>    around we knew that the clip-clop of horses meant the wagon was coming.
> So, there's nothing
>    inherent in those engine sounds."
>
>    Lobster arguing its case as its pulled out of tank
>    "But I'm one of the cool ones!"
>    Cartoon by Suerynn Lee
>
>    A well-designed alert reaches the people who need to hear it, without
> annoying those who
>    don't. To thread this sonic needle, engineers can vary a particular
> sound's decibel level,
>    which indicates the volume of air pressure that the sound waves
> displace, and they can also
>    adjust the sound's pitch, or frequency. Both decibel level and pitch
> determine the
>    intrusiveness of that sound. The danger is that you create a sound that
> cries wolf, as it
>    were: it works at first, but after a while people tune it out, so you
> have to pump up the
>    volume.
>
>    Although humans are capable of hearing frequencies between twenty and
> twenty thousand
>    hertz, we hear in "octave bands," in which the highest frequency is
> double the lowest one.
>    (In a musical C octave, the high C is twice the frequency of the low
> C.) The regulations
>    specify that AVAS sounds must cover four separate, nonadjacent octave
> bands. A so-called
>    broadband sound of this type, such as the staticky squawk that Amazon
> delivery vans
>    recently began making when reversing, is less piercing, more robust,
> and easier for the
>    hearer to locate directionally than an alert that occupies a narrow
> frequency range, such
>    as the back-up beepers on Con Ed trucks. Not incidentally, the
> nonadjacent-octave-band rule
>    precludes using a musical phrase as an alert--the pitch-shifting would
> sound awful--as well
>    as any vocal alerts, human or animal. How would the blind tell the
> street from the sidewalk
>    if electric cars spoke or barked?
>
>    By permitting automakers the latitude to brand their alerts, the
> N.H.T.S.A. rules have
>    created a new design form: acoustic automobile styling. Pedestrians and
> cyclists won't just
>    hear the vehicle coming; they'll know what kind of car it is. For
> acoustic designers, both
>    the pedestrian alerts of E.V.s and their rich in-cabin menus of sonic
> information represent
>    the dawn of a new age. "I feel fortunate that I get to work on features
> that will influence
>    the way the world will sound," Jigar Kapadia, the creative-sound
> director for General
>    Motors, told me.
>
>    Kapadia, who studied electronics and telecommunications engineering at
> Mumbai University
>    and has a master's in music technology from N.Y.U., collaborates with
> Moore and others at
>    G.M.'s sound lab in Milford, Michigan. For each sound, the team comes
> up with about two
>    hundred variations and then tests them on their colleagues in the jury
> room, until they
>    have arrived at a few finalists they can road test on vehicles.
>
>    Kapadia likens an alert-system sound to a perfume. "Just like a
> perfume, it unfolds," he
>    told me. "The alert has a base note, a middle note, and a top note." He
> added, "These
>    layers are amalgamated together to bring out a cohesive organic sound,
> or a futuristic
>    sound, based on what kind of brand we are focussing on." He noted that
> the pedestrian alert
>    on the 2023 Cadillac Lyriq, the first electric version of G.M.'s
> long-standing luxury car,
>    was made with a didgeridoo, an ancient Australian wind instrument that
> is based on the
>    musical interval known as a perfect fifth. However, for G.M.'s
> nine-thousand-pound electric
>    Hummer, which recently went on sale, Kapadia said, "we wanted a more
> distorted sound." He
>    paused, and then added, "A bold Hummer sound." The Hummer's
> forward-motion alert made me
>    think of church, when the organist launches into the next hymn. The
> back-up sound is
>    something like its dystopian twin.
>
>    At the Ford Motor Company, in order to find out what car buyers thought
> electric vehicles
>    should sound like, engineers and consultants conducted "customer
> clinics" and launched a
>    Facebook campaign. Judging from the number of responses, Ford fans were
> keen to make their
>    opinions known. My own survey, largely based on reading comments under
> YouTube videos of
>    various branded E.V. sounds, is that most people think that E.V.s
> should not resemble
>    I.C.E. cars. Higher frequencies are thought to signify clean energy and
> software-driven
>    intelligence; E.V.s ought to whoosh and zoom like the flying personal
> vehicles of
>    science-fiction films such as "The Fifth Element," "Gattaca," "Blade
> Runner," and, of
>    course, "Star Wars." In many cases, in fact, Foley artists created
> those futuristic
>    vehicles' sound effects from recorded I.C.E. noise. In Ridley Scott's
> "Blade Runner 2049,"
>    the twist is that Ryan Gosling's flying vehicle sounds like a
> broken-down I.C.E. jalopy.
>
>    Ford's Brian Schabel, a sound engineer who, like Moore at G.M., has
> spent his career in
>    Noise and Vibration, was part of the group that worked on the Mustang
> Mach E, Ford's sporty
>    but practical electric S.U.V. "We knew we wanted to keep some aspect of
> that low-frequency
>    modulation and link it to the past," he told me. "And then we looked at
> everything out
>    there. Machinery--what do people associate powerful electric motors
> with? Formula E
>    vehicles are very high-pitched, raw-sounding. How can we blend those
> two pieces together?
>    We didn't want something that was too `Batman' or `Blade Runner.' "
> Mach E's forward sound
>    put me in mind of a hovering dragonfly. The back-up sound is like a
> broadband cricket.
>
>    In creating the company's new palette, Ford collaborated with Listen,
> an audio-branding
>    firm based in Brooklyn. One member of the Listen agency, Connor Moore
> (no relation to
>    Douglas), is the founder of CMoore Sound, and has worked with Google on
> Firefly, its
>    self-driving-car project, as well as with Tesla, Lucid, Uber, and other
> tech companies. An
>    electronic musician, Moore explained that he uses the same process and
> production tools for
>    cars that he relies on to make music, mixing synthetic tracks with
> recordings of physical
>    objects and nature sounds.
>
>    "With the F-150 Lightning," Moore said, discussing the electric model
> of Ford's immensely
>    popular pickup, "you're thinking about the size and the scale of the
> car. So some of that
>    means recording heavy objects: metals, stone, things that have weight.
> You want something
>    with low-end distortion that hits you in the chest. We also worked with
> more organic
>    elements, like wind and water sounds, and clay and wood. We really
> leaned on a lot of the
>    organic material for the in-car alerts."
>
>    I asked Moore about the possibility that, by allowing for a unique
> identity for each of the
>    sixty major auto brands in the world, we were setting ourselves up for
> a sonic
>    catastrophe--a cacophony of competing thrums and whirs and chimes and
> tones. If every car
>    is emitting a unique branded alert as it passes under my bedroom
> window, aren't my novelty
>    detectors going to go haywire? I described my street to Moore, noting
> that there is a
>    traffic light about twenty yards away, where there are often six or
> eight cars waiting.
>    Once the cars are all E.V.s, will I need to move to an apartment at the
> top of the nearby
>    ninety-three-story Brooklyn Tower just to get some sleep?
>
>    Moore replied, "I think with intentional-design thinking we can
> actually, maybe, make the
>    world quieter. That's my goal." However, he added, "we could wake up in
> five years with
>    eighty per cent E.V.s, and it's a cacophony of sound and dissonance if
> these cars are all
>    singing different tunes, in different key signatures and pitches."
> Moore speculated that
>    cities might one day have to designate a particular key for all the
> alerts made in their
>    streets. (I nominate F-sharp major, the key of Jay-Z and Alicia Keys's
> "Empire State of
>    Mind.") On second thought, Moore said, "maybe, you know, that would
> potentially drive
>    people crazy."
>
>    Then there is the question of how customizable a vehicle's alert system
> should be. In 2017,
>    automakers petitioned the N.H.T.S.A. to be allowed to offer drivers a
> range of options that
>    they could select from. The agency, after a public-review period,
> denied the request for
>    safety reasons, but the issue could come up again. If Boombox, a
> software feature in
>    Teslas, is any indication of what's on the way, it will be difficult to
> limit the sounds
>    that drivers play through E.V.s' external speakers. Boombox, which was
> released in
>    December, 2020, as part of a software update, allows Tesla drivers,
> according to its
>    promotional literature, to "delight pedestrians with a variety of
> sounds from your
>    vehicle's external speaker," including goat bleats, ice-cream-truck
> music, applause, and
>    flatulence. In early 2022, the N.H.T.S.A. found the Boombox feature
> noncompliant with its
>    rules. Musk called regulators the "fun police," but Tesla nonetheless
> issued a firmware
>    update that prohibits the use of Boombox when driving, although hackers
> will probably find
>    a way around it. Teslas can still fart when parked.
>
>    Another possibility is that New York City is just too loud for the
> relatively civilized
>    decibel levels established for the alert systems by N.H.T.S.A.
> regulations. Douglas Moore
>    told me that "the levels are set to where a normal person would be able
> to hear it in a
>    normal situation. It is not expected to be heard in all places"--such
> as construction
>    zones--"at all times. Otherwise, you're in the death spiral of just
> cranking the levels
>    up."
>
>    But a death spiral could be what we get. Because, after all, what's the
> point of an alert
>    if you can't hear it? I borrowed a Mach E not long ago, and took it for
> a spin around
>    Brooklyn with a colleague who was planning to record the car in motion.
> He jumped out on
>    Kent Street, in Williamsburg, and stood with his microphone as I drove
> past, but the Mach
>    E's forward-motion alert barely registered. As a second-story sleeper,
> I was reassured. As
>    a cyclist, not so much.
>
>    Just before six the other morning, while I was still asleep, my hearing
> picked up a novel
>    sound coming toward me: a thud-thUD-THUD, reverberating off the façade
> of the apartment
>    building across the street, getting louder as it came closer.
>
>    Was it an E.V. alert? I woke up just long enough to grasp that it was
> someone bouncing a
>    ball down the middle of the street. After passing under my window, the
> THUD-THud-thud faded
>    until the street was quiet again. At 6:45 a.m., the first of the
> garbage trucks came by. cD
>
>    Published in the print edition of the August 8, 2022, issue, with the
> headline "On Alert."
>
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