[NFBC-At-Large] Fwd: [NFBC-Info] From the New Yorker: Annals of Sound

[Carmen Weatherly]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Brian Buhrow via NFBC-Info <nfbc-info at nfbnet.org>
> Date: August 3, 2022 at 12:39:13 AM PDT
> To: nfbc-info at nfbnet.org
> Cc: Brian Buhrow <buhrow at nfbcal.org>
> Subject: [NFBC-Info] From the New Yorker: Annals of Sound
> Reply-To: NFB of California List <nfbc-info at nfbnet.org>
> 
>     Hello fellow Federationists.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with the work the NFB
> did to pass the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act, the article below tells the story of this
> act and the NFB's involvement.  I personally worked in the test groups they mention, as well as
> walking alongside the rest of you in Congress to get the legislation passed.  this act is the
> single most important reason why hybrid and electric vehicle sold since 2020 and beyond are
> loud enough to let us hear them before they run us over in the streets.  I am proud of the work
> the NFB did to get this very important piece of legislation passed and the regulations written
> so we can continue to travel safely on our streets and byways.  And now that you know about it,
> you should be too!
> 
> Link and text pasted below.
> 
> -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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