At a previous design gig, I had a co-worker who'd derisively refer to our boss—behind his back, naturally—as "The Millimeter." Because whenever we'd submit renderings to him for approval, he'd invariably say "Looks good, but can you move this line just a millimeter to the [left/right]?" He couldn't help himself; he'd have said it to a child drawing a rectangle or to Michelangelo carving David.
Just as industrial designers pore over millimeters, radii and materials, sound designers obsess about details laypeople will probably never notice. Take, for example, the sound that you hear when getting an incoming video call on Facebook:
Get this: That chord is comprised of the musical notes F-A-C-E. (For you music geeks, Everett Katigbak, co-founder of Facebook's Analog Research Laboratory, tells the developmental story behind that particular sound effect here.)Auto manufacturers have been tuning exhaust notes for decades, but the new frontier is electric car noises. The consensus is that the otherwise silent cars need to produce contrived sounds below 20 m.p.h. to alert pedestrians to their presence. Audi's got a guy working an actual musical instrument (well, a digital piano) to create theirs:
Nissan's Leaf, meanwhile, goes with a fairly conventional jetliner noise:
With the home-market Prius, Toyota went a bit further, going for a more spaceship effect. (You needn't watch the entire video, a few seconds will give you the idea.)
The beleaguered Fisker Karma wins the Coolest Sound prize with its Tron-like buzzing:
For years I've been incorrectly predicting that e-car owners would be able to purchase and download "vroom tones," so you'd hear TIE Fighters going down Broadway and such, but I'm starting to doubt it will happen now.
Lastly, while we're on the subject of sounds, a simple website has gone up called IKEA in Swedish. You simply click on the photo of the product you'd like to pronounce—like OMBYTLIG, which seems like some Internet acronym I'm too old to get—and you get a recording of an actual Swede saying it.
Now there's an interesting concept, maybe for Volvo: Have an e-car noise that's just a guy yelling out IKEA product names.
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