Raudie McLeod
Music & Sound Studio
I recently saw a TikTok of an inner city street in Shenzhen, China. A nighttime city scene, heavy with automotive traffic 2 wheels and 4, with the all of the visual stimulus, but none of the audible tooting and revving. It was as if someone had replaced the video with audio from another time and place, devoid of cars. The POV voiceover states “Really the only thing you hear anymore is people honking their horns” tbh it seemed really quite pleasant.
As the world’s locomotives transition to electric power, the quotidien urban cacophony of combustion engines will slowly grow silent. The quietude of battery powered vehicles will near eliminate industrial noise pollution in urban environments, bar construction, some transport and… vacuum cleaners?
There is a global cross-disciplinary effort to sonify public transport electric vehicles (EVs) to ensure the safety of the urbanite from rapidly and silently approaching tonnes of glass and steel. The London bus has already contracted sound design studio Zelig to produce a soft, pleasant sound which will emanate from the city’s buses. The private sector is right on its coattails with Hans Zimmer composing the “engine” sounds of the BMW i4 M50.
Volkswagen, Audi too are employing musicians to help score the sound of locomotive futures. Sound design is becoming increasingly important as the world sheds its analog skin and turns digital.
In the west, it is an auditory snapshot of the future, which has already half-arrived. A softer life soundtrack which is smooth and filtered, pleasant and inoffensive. It follows a wider 21st century trend of a smoothening of the socio-political cultural fabric. Byun-Chul Han explores this idea of “smoothness” in his book Saving Beauty. He posits that "The smooth is the signature of the present time. It does not hurt; it is unresistant, frictionless." Which is evident in social media, consumer electronic products and experiences, government services, rebranded typographic logos, the loss of colour, language norms, the list goes on. Han claims this pursuit of smoothness results in the "pornography of beauty," where aesthetics are reduced to mere consumable pleasures without deeper meaning or negativity. That negativity of beauty is key to its sublimity.
In the EU, where I live, the United Nations Resolution 138 stipulates very specific parameters for EVs and sound. Sound pressure, pitch and frequency are the the boundaries you must work inside which leave a very narrow scope of possibility. If you’ve walked around any urban hub in the EU you’ve probably heard the soft and inoffensive tones emanating from EVs as they move around the city spaces, rising in pitch as they accelerate and descending as they slow down. They are noticeably the sonic opposite of the sound of combustion engines.
Is this moving toward a benevolent acoustic ecology or the 21st century’s version of anthrophony? If capitalism has taught me anything it’s that we should always be skeptical of seemingly positive innovations.
Civc safety is a very important topical issue as we begin to truly grasp the hazardous environment we have built within which to live. In Juliette Volcler’s interview with ARTE ‘Quel pouvoir a le son?’ (What power does sound have?) She states that companies invent ‘positive personalities’ for the products as if they were benevolent servants. For example, Samsung’s washing machine. She also posits that even though these benevolent sounds are invented to seduce and appease us, the priority of the product (private) always comes before the purchaser (public).
It’s a flip of the record of Biopolitics that Michel Foucault became famous for conceiving – that institutions control us through disciplinary hierarchical power. The school, the hospital, the prison etc. They are all vertical hierarchical systems designed to control citizens in a society. However these days, which Byung-Chul Han again elaborates in Psycho-Politics, power is not disciplinary but encouraging. You are not told ‘No’ but encouraged to say ‘Yes’. To optimise yourself, to succeed. Of course however authorities and states will use aggression when any real threat to their power becomes apparent, as seen recently with the use of illegal LRADs (sonic cannons) by Serbia’s Vučić government.
So what does it mean to live in this uncanny valley where the car-shaped locomotive behaves and looks like a car but sounds like some AI generated ambient Aphex Twin? Even as I type into the notes app with my phone on loud Apple’s responsive click noises soundtrack in real time my tapping. There’s no mechanical reaction which causes the typing noise, someone invented that so the UX feels more real. This might seem innocuous but back to what Han and Volcler said. Who designs the sounds and why are they so pleasant? Do you remember the apologue of the boiling frog? Of course in the end the frog jumps out when the water is too hot.