Symphony of Silence: Crafting Sound in the Cabins of Contemporary Cars
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
The modern automotive landscape is evolving to prioritize a serene auditory environment within the vehicle’s cabin, marking a shift from mere transportation to an enhanced, multisensory driving experience. This transformation is largely driven by electric mobility and sophisticated sound control technologies.
Key Takeaways:
Concert of Quietude: Transition from loud engine noises to a calming auditory landscape within modern vehicles. Electric mobility and sound control technologies are pivotal in this evolution.
Soft Sounds Spectrum: Modern vehicles feature a spectrum of soft sounds, each designed to enhance the driving experience. The emphasis is on creating a soft soundscape that provides feedback, fosters safety, and enhances perceived quality.
Multisensory Melody: A cohesive multisensory experience is achieved through the integration of visual, tactile, and auditory feedback. Auditory feedback complements visual and tactile feedback, offering a reassuring and intuitive interaction with the vehicle.
Auditory Aesthetics: Sound design extends beyond functionality to reflect the vehicle’s personality and brand ethos. Soft sounds are seen as a sonic signature that adds to the vehicle’s premium appeal.
Touch Sounds Tapestry: Touch sounds are an essential component, providing feedback and enhancing sensory interaction with the vehicle. Optimization of touch sounds delves into understanding the iconic and associative content arising from these auditory cues.
Fine-Tuning the Frequency: The process of fine-tuning involves adjusting the frequency, pitch, and tone of sounds to ensure harmonious auditory feedback. An understanding of psychoacoustic parameters is crucial for achieving a pleasant and intuitive auditory ambiance.
Future of Automotive Acoustics:
E-mobility emphasizes harmonizing soft sounds in vehicles for a multisensory experience. Perfecting touch-related sounds boosts perceived quality, yet standardization remains challenging. Future designs will focus on multisensory alignment and sophisticated soundscapes.
Soft Sounds and Multisensory Harmony
Cars are changing a lot these days thanks to new technology that helps control how they sound. This, along with newer and quieter engines, makes the inside of cars much quieter. When you add self-driving technology to the mix, cars are becoming more comfortable and useful. They now feel more like a cozy living room with a mix of different soft sounds that make up the car’s environment.
Multisensory Harmony
Now, the aim is not only to have a quiet car but also to have a car with sounds that are soft and pleasing to the ear.
It’s about adjusting these sounds carefully to give the right feedback and create a comfy and harmonious atmosphere inside the car. This requires tuning the sounds to the right level, making sure they aren’t too loud or too soft, so they feel just right to the people inside.
A car’s interior is filled with different sensations - what you see, touch, hear, and even smell.
All these add to the overall feeling or experience you have while sitting in the car. Earlier, cars were noisy due to the loud engines, but now electric engines have made cars much quieter. This change brings attention to the soft sounds inside the car that help make the inside feel lively and comfortable.
A quiet car should not be confused with a completely silent car.
A quiet car has soft sounds that don’t demand your attention but add to the cozy atmosphere. These sounds should give clear information without startling or confusing the driver or passengers. Especially as cars start driving themselves more, the inside is becoming more like a comfy living room.
In a living room, we hear many soft sounds like steps on the floor or water running, which we usually don’t notice but they make the room feel alive.
Similarly, soft sounds in a car, like the click of a button or the sound of touching a surface, are important for a good driving experience.
These sounds provide feedback and help us interact with the car in a natural way.
To make a car’s inside feel just right, designers have to look at each sense separately, like how things look and feel, and how sounds and smells interact with each other. This way, they can adjust the sounds and other sensations to create a comfortable atmosphere. This process is just starting and there’s a lot to learn to get it right. But the goal is to make every car ride a pleasant experience by paying attention to how all these sensations, especially soft sounds, come together to create a calm and enjoyable atmosphere inside the car.
Auditory Feedback in Cars
In today’s vehicular journey, the ambiance within the car’s cabin plays a pivotal role in driving experience. Among the senses engaged, the auditory feedback stands as a subtle yet significant guide, mapping out essential functions through a choreography of sounds.
Figure 1
Imagine driving an electric vehicle - as you step on the accelerator, the rise in pitch of the hum under the hood tells you about the increasing speed. This is auditory feedback at its simplest, where a single sound parameter, like pitch, volume, or tone, narrates a single operational feature, such as acceleration.
In the past, the narrative was different, often louder.
High-pitched beeping tones were common, catching high attention but lacking clear information. They were more of an annoyance, startling drivers rather than aiding them.
Now, the script has flipped. Soft sounds with less tonality but clear communicational content are the new narrators.
They not only inform drivers about the ongoing operations but also hint at what’s to come. For instance, a soft hum alerting pedestrians of an approaching vehicle, ensuring safety in silence.
The essence of sound design now resonates with functional communication and is an integral part of multisensory design.
It’s not just about the audible; it’s about the visual and tactile too.
When you press a button, the tactile feel, the visual change on the dashboard, and the soft ‘click’ sound form a trinity of feedback, ensuring you are in control, even when your eyes are on the road.
Figure 2
The sound narrative extends to even the touch sounds that emerge as fingers slide over surfaces, exploring the car’s interior. It’s about orchestrating a soundscape where every auditory cue, be it a switch ‘click’ or the rustle of adjusting the seat, blends with the car’s environment, adding to the overall ambiance without jarring the senses.
In modern cars, especially those with electric engines and quieter ambiance, this auditory choreography becomes even more nuanced.
It’s not about loud or glaring sounds but soft, informative tones that merge with the holistic soundscape, creating a calm, intuitive driving narrative.
The auditory journey in modern vehicles is less about noise and more about nuanced notes, each sound fine-tuned to deliver essential information, ensuring the drive is not just comfortable, but intuitive and safe. The modern car is not just a machine; it’s a symphony on wheels, with each sound contributing to a harmonious driving melody.
Touch Sounds
In the heart of modern automotive design, there lies a silent yet profound character - the touch sound. It’s the soft whisper that breathes life into the car’s interior, each time a surface is caressed or a button is beckoned. This soft symphony accompanies our interactions with switches, the steering wheel, the parking brake lever, and touch screens, narrating the tale of material essence through soft murmurs.
Touch Sounds
As we dive into this auditory landscape, we find that touch sounds are more than mere echoes; they are the narrators of material perception.
They whisper the tales of texture and quality, painting auditory pictures of what our fingers grace. However, sometimes, these sounds can be illusionists, making the perceived features dance away from the physical reality of the material, potentially leading to a misinterpretation of material quality.
This sonic experience is not just an auditory affair; it’s a multisensory dialogue where the visual, auditory, and tactile perceptions weave a complex narrative.
The sound of touch can alter the tactile portrait of surfaces, for instance, a smacking sound when hands part from the steering wheel might amplify the perceived stickiness of the surface, while a sandpaper-like rustle could hint at discomfort, akin to the fear of injury that real sandpaper might induce.
Diving deeper, studies on the perceived quality of steering wheel materials unveil that the narrative isn’t just about single sense assessments; the touch sound has the power to modify the tactile appearance, demanding a broader scope in material requirements to encompass the auditory modality.
Figure 3
The art of optimizing touch sounds isn’t just about silencing the noisy whispers; it’s about understanding the iconic contents arising from material interactions. The rustle as fingers slide over a surface could evoke images of paper, cork, or polystyrene, each with its unique tale of quality and texture. This auditory cue is a bridge between the finger and the material, a sonic dance occurring amidst the friction, and resulting in a broad-band noise resonating in the mid- to high-frequency range.
Figure 4
The acoustic tale of touch is not confined to the surface; it travels through the material, whispering its narrative across the vehicle’s interior, occasionally reaching neighboring parts and sometimes causing a soft chatter known as squeak and rattle effects.
Understanding and harnessing the physics of touch sounds is akin to orchestrating a subtle yet impactful symphony. The challenges lie in devising standardized sound excitation methods, ensuring a constant force, defined sliding velocity, and consistent interface conditions during the testing phase.
Figure 5
Though the path towards mastering the quiet narrative of touch sounds has its share of complexities, the essence it adds to perceived quality and material authenticity is unparalleled. The journey of optimizing these gentle whispers is a venture into enhancing the vehicle’s interior appearance, aiming for a higher realm of customer acceptance and a richer tapestry of the driving experience.
As we continue to explore and refine the science of touch sounds, we step closer to an automotive realm where every touch resonates with quality, every sound echoes sophistication, and every interaction is a note in the harmonious melody of modern driving.
Adjustment of the Perceived Intensity of Sound
The car - a modern marvel, a synthesis of engineering and art, a vessel that transports not just bodies, but hearts and minds. Amidst its complex choreography of mechanical and electrical ballet, there exists a delicate layer of communication, a soft dialogue between the machine and its master, whispered through the gentle touch of a button, the tender turn of the steering wheel, and the silent gaze upon its displays. This delicate narrative is the essence of multisensory design, a realm where the visual, tactile, and auditory senses dance to a rhythm that resonates with the elegance, comfort, and functionality inherent in the modern automobile.
However, orchestrating this soft symphony is no trivial endeavor. It requires a meticulous measure, a precise dance between the intensity of stimuli across all senses.
Each sound, each visual cue, and each tactile feedback must be fine-tuned to resonate at the right pitch, to convey the essential information without overwhelming the sensory stage.
This delicate balance is about ensuring that the essential foreground signals rise gracefully above the comforting hum of background sounds, creating a soundscape that is both informative and inviting.
Perception of Sound
Conclusions
Exploration and Methodological Advancements:
The path toward optimizing soft sounds unveils a realm rich in potential but fraught with challenges, such as finding accurate measurement devices for low sound pressure levels and improving methodologies for assessing low loudness sounds.
A notable challenge lies in crafting a standard excitation for touch sounds, which requires a collaborative effort across industries to develop applicable devices and methodologies that can decode the complex quality of the interior soundscape.
Future Prospects and Cross-Industrial Collaboration:
The discourse highlights the importance of cross-industrial collaboration to move beyond individual contributions and explore the collective resonance of multiple low-level sources.
The journey toward advanced sound design for soft signals within the car’s interior is seen as a promising venture into uncharted territory, with a vision to transform the car from a mere machine to a melody, enhancing the overall driving experience through a symphony of sophisticated, serene, and satisfactory interactions.
Disclaimer: This Future Insight is the adaptation of the original research art
About this paper:
Haverkamp, M. (2020). Adjustment of soft sounds in cars for multisensory harmony. In INTER-NOISE and NOISE-CON Congress and Conference Proceedings (Vol. 261, No. 2, pp. 4941-4941). Institute of Noise Control Engineering.
#AutomotiveDesign #eMobility #AcousticEngineering #MultisensoryDesign #VehicleInterior #SoundDesign #FutureOfMobility #cardesign #sounddesign #intendedfuture #perceivedquality.