Erica Basnicki chats with Steve Levine about how guitar pedal technology, plug-in architecture, and Lexicon reverb algorithms might factor into the sound your car makes in the near future
WITH FUEL costs perpetually on the rise, the popularity of electric and hybrid/electric vehicles is following suit. In eliminating vehicle petrol consumption, however, another problem arises: eliminating the sound of combustion engines that pedestrians and cyclists have become accustomed to hearing on the roads. Electric vehicles are quiet:
deadly quiet. At the University of California, Riverside in the US, experiments have shown that electric vehicles (or hybrid
vehicles running in electric mode) need to be 74% closer to subjects before they could hear them. In the real world, that means not being able to hear an electric car until it’s one second away: hardly enough time for any effective avoidance manoeuvres. Once finalised, European
legislation will determine just what kinds of sounds electric vehicles will need to make, and how loud they’ll need to be. (One experiment in Holland has already seen a Domino’s pizza delivery scooter using specially recorded sounds to
In the future, car sounds could be customised just as we customise ringtones
alert pedestrians to its presence.) But if the sound is changing on the outside, what about interior sounds?
Using his skills as both a film composer and a record producer, music producer Steve Levine has been in the studio working on the design of sounds inside electric vehicles “so you do get the sense
of acceleration, deceleration, all the things that give you comfort when you’re driving”, he explains. “People are used to a combustion engine of some sort, and therefore the inherent feeling that that car gives you in terms of you awareness of speed, safety and all those things. That’s part of the task in creating the various sound sets.”
Levine stresses that the sounds inside the vehicle aren’t simply a collection of samples and loops playing over and over again. “This is a fully interactive replacement to the sound of what a combustion engine would do,” says Levine of the work he is doing with HALOSonic: a partnership between Harman