Whether you love them or loathe them, artificial engine and motor sounds are becoming more ubiquitous in cars. Some companies are doing interesting things with them. Hyundai and Kia are using artificial sounds to help simulate gear shifts. BMW went to the lengths of getting famed film composer Hans Zimmer to help create sounds for its EVs such as the iX and i4. The company apparently isn’t content with just using the same old sound system forever, though. For the Neue Klasse electric cars, it’s building on those basics, sometimes with unusual sources.
Nature Sounds And BMW Employees Talking
The new sound system BMW will employ is called HypersonX. Something that the company says it’s aiming to evoke are feelings of “precision, warmth, and lightness.” To that end, it has been sampling “tones from nature and structures from the worlds of art and science.” Included in all of this, are apparently, and very literally, the voices of the BMW Design Studio. The team brought employees into a room, and had them reflect on and talk about “moments of driving joy.” Samples of those conversations are then used to create the welcome sound upon entering the car.
Dimensional Sound And Light Interactions
Aside from the sources of sound, BMW says the new system is more advanced in a number of ways. It uses a new algorithm that has the ability to vary sounds more than the current one, depending on the driving situation, and this should help give more information and feedback to the driver as to what the car is doing.
BMW talks quite a bit about adding more “dimension” to the sounds. Our understanding is that it’s implementing some audio tricks used in games and movies to adjust sounds so that they reflect something moving. As an example, if you’re playing a game like Gran Turismo, and you pass a car in the game, the sound will change so that it sounds like the car you passed is behind you. So we think there may be certain sounds in the BMW that can be adjusted to make it sound like things are whooshing past you, to enhance the feeling of acceleration.
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Finally, BMW is doing more to connect the lights and sound in the car. So we’re expecting to see more ambient light animations that will reflect what’s happening with the car. As a speculative example, colors could fade from blue to red based on acceleration, and then back for deceleration. Maybe some pulses of color could move along the ambient light channels to enhance the feeling of motion, and they could move at different rates with different speeds. These are just possible ideas, though, we’ll have to wait for the reveal of the first Neue Klasse, the iX3, this fall to know more.
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