New Scientist examines Formula E and the joy of NOISE!

[AK350Z]

I've pasted the article here for the benefit of those who don't have the mag, as online you need a sub to read it.

 

(make a brew, long article)

 

 

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The scream of a Formula 1 engine, the growl of a luxury saloon: both evoke visceral reactions. Can electric cars do the same?

ON 13 SEPTEMBER, the inaugural Formula E race will be shown live on TV. Hopefully the broadcast will go better than the first time all-electric car racing was televised. US network ESPN gave the Formula Lightning series its TV debut during an August 1994 edition of the show

Thursday Night Thunder

. The cars were built by students as part of a research project, so any coverage was a bonus. National TV coverage was a dream come true.

Unfortunately, ESPN missed the start. When cameras cut to the track at Indianapolis, the cars were already racing. The joke doing the rounds later was that the cameraman had fallen asleep and the electric cars were so quiet they didn't wake him.

Twenty years on, the $50 million

all-electric Formula E

championship hopes to awaken motor-sport enthusiasts to the idea of sustainable racing. Over the next nine months, 10 teams representing big names from motor sport history such as Audi and Andretti will tear along city-centre circuits from Beijing to Berlin at speeds of up to 240 kilometres per hour, without consuming a single drop of petrol.

Yet racing fans have been reluctant to embrace the idea. In bars, parking lots and internet forums, the chat is of a project doomed to fail. If Formula E is the future of environmentally friendly motor sport, some say they'll take their chances with global warming. The reason? Those green cars are just too quiet. It kills the enjoyment.

So what is it about the roar of combustion engines that appeals? Why does the noise a vehicle makes matter so much, to spectators and drivers alike? And can Formula E ever find its way into our hearts, when a key route is through our ears?

Certainly the stakes are high for the organisers and teams in Formula E. International motor sport is a multibillion dollar business that seems to directly affect the sale of consumer cars. A

2010 study

suggests that a phenomenon called "win on Sunday, sell on Monday" is real: car-makers that win races get a subsequent boost in sales. Manufacturers including Renault and Indian car giant Mahindra are betting that participation in Formula E will showcase eco-friendly technologies that consumers will soon want for themselves.

First they have to ensure people flock to the races and enjoy the spectacle. And one key to that, it seems, is the characteristic roar of powerful engines. According to Marshall Pruett, Indycar crew-member turned motor-sports journalist, the ideal sound carries a tone of aggression. "Whether it's testosterone, adrenaline or lord-knows-what, people have a learned expectation that a screaming engine equals a racecar," he says.

 

 

Lack of oomph

 

But this expectation is being challenged.

New regulations for Formula 1 engine designs

have been introduced for the 2014 season: previously cars used 2.4-litre, V8 (eight-cylinder) engines but now they are limited to V6 1.6-litre designs, albeit with turbochargers and kinetic energy recovery systems that collect energy during braking and use it to boost acceleration.

Although turbochargers add a high-pitched jet-like whine, with fewer cylinders the new engines are bound to lose some of their acoustic oomph. F1's governing body, the FIA, has already received an ear bashing from people who don't appreciate the quieter engines – including Bernie Ecclestone, head of Formula One Management.

At the trackside, these changes mean that peaks in the volume of engine noise have fallen from 145 decibels – above the pain threshold – to 134 dB, which is half as loud, but still loud enough to cause ear damage. More significant, says

Trevor Cox

, an acoustic engineer at the University of Salford, UK, is the change in pitch. The old F1 engines produced a peak in volume at between 500 and 2500 hertz, which is approximately the frequency of a human scream, but the new engines are much quieter in this range

(see graph)

.

That is what truly upset F1 fans, Cox believes. "A scream is a distress call, so it's natural that something that sounds like a scream would put us on edge. That's what people mean when they talk about the 'visceral experience' of the old V8s." Pruett agrees: he describes the new F1 sound as "less fearsome", and feels that the controversy will work to Formula E's detriment. "People are already sensitive to the fact that they want their old Formula 1 sound back," he says.

Getting fans to fall in love with Formula E was never going to be easy. At low speeds, electric cars are almost silent, and that is most people's only experience of them. Beyond normal street speeds, however, noise created by tyres, and vibrations from the road and the engine's spinning rotor become more noticeable

(see graphic)

.

At 100 kilometres per hour, a conventional car sounds off at about 70 dB, but near its top speed of 240 kph, a Formula E car generates about 80 db, making it twice as loud. And because the electric motor spins at a high frequency, it offers some of the screaming quality that fans enjoy, although at a lower volume than F1 cars produce.

According to Tom Phillips, spokesman for Formula E, none of this will be a problem. "The sound of any racing car is incredibly important. The sound of the Formula E car is just as important, and we hope it will surprise many people, especially fans who assume it will be silent," he says.

All this raises a deeper question: what draws humans to the sound of thundering engines in the first place? According to New York University psychologist Gary Marcus, research on human preferences for music can offer clues.

Marcus has analysed what makes music pleasurable and how the human brain latches on to a particular tune. Catchy songs offer rhythm, repetition and variation, he says – repetition in tune, and variation via a brief contrasting melody called a bridge. The bridge normally begins about two-thirds of the way through a song to keep listeners from getting bored; it clears the mind so that we can enjoy returning to the original melody at the end.

Marcus suggests that our brains latch on to car sounds in the same way, with acceleration and deceleration providing rhythm and melody, and gear changes providing the variation. "I don't think the question is whether car sounds can be thought of as music per se, but whether car sounds tap into some of the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie our perception of music. And here the answer is very likely yes," he says. "Mechanisms that make us enjoy rhythm, repetition, and especially repetition with variation, are likely older than music itself, and could well play a part in the pleasure that some people get from listening to car sounds – and all sorts of other sonic textures."

Away from the track, car-makers are already old hands at tapping into the sonic desires of consumers (see "

Sold on sounds

"). And it is not only F1 fans who like to hear a growl – drivers of powerful cars tend to want the engine to sound powerful, so that is what manufacturers have given them.

 

 

The sound of silence

 

Yet just as with F1, the sound of change is in the air. In the past decade or so, the car industry has had to cope with tougher noise regulations, along with changing demands from a growing number of drivers who are not so much interested in a throaty growl as a quiet interior and good fuel economy. Smaller engines and extra insulation have helped cut noise, while the drive to reduce fuel use has led to engines that operate at lower revs. A typical 4 litre design that once spun at about 3500 revs per minute, for instance, now runs at less than 2000 rpm.

Car-makers still want to persuade you their model is the one to buy, however, and to the ear, these greener engines may lack the desired va-va-voom. So companies have increasingly turned to audio engineers to keep consumers happy. These people pick apart the noises made by each component of a vehicle and adjust them so that the sounds fit with customers' expectations. "The sound goals influence the design and construction of the vehicle from the very early stages," says Rainer Beer, a sound designer for BMW in Germany.

Indeed, acoustic performance is deemed so important that companies including VW, Porsche and Ford have added "noise pipes" to some of their vehicles. Just like organ pipes, these resonate at specific frequencies, adding growl to the engine sound when needed. Yet even this seems old-fashioned compared with the "active" audio augmentation that some companies are rolling out.

Car soundscapes can now be reshaped at the flick of a switch. In 2011, for instance, VW replaced noise pipes with a system called the Soundaktor. It consists of a computer-controlled speaker that generates extra noise when a more powerful engine note is needed and which is fixed to the firewall between the engine and the driver's compartment. Manufacturers also use active noise cancellation technology to muffle the lowest-frequency "groaning" sounds. It records the in-car sound and rebroadcasts it out of phase with the original so the two cancel each other out.

In some top-of-the-range cars, firms including Cadillac and BMW have gone even further. BMW's M series cars, for instance, feature an "active sound design" system that takes its cue from the engine's throttle, speed and rev settings to create a synthetic soundtrack that is played through in-car speakers to augment the engine's natural sound. Switching between driving modes – from Sport to Comfort, say – changes the engine noise to match. "The sound reflects this, leaping into focus when driving hard, then receding into the background when cruising," says engineer Emar Vegt, who worked with Beer on BMW's new M5.

What some dismiss as theatre could make driving more pleasurable. Yet the increasingly artificial soundtrack we hear on the highway might come at some cost to safety.

Sounds from the engine, along with wind noise and booming vibrations from the road, provide a driver with important auditory feedback on speed and car handling. According to work by engineer Guy Walker, now at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK, when drivers receive less feedback from a vehicle, they tend to

underestimate their speed and drive faster

. In a separate UK study, a team of psychologists from the universities of Sheffield and Plymouth found that reduced auditory feedback in driving simulations led drivers to

speed and to make more mistakes

. Worse, drivers do not seem to realise that their situational awareness is diminished, says Walker. He thinks there is a significant risk that the anticipated safety benefits of new vehicle technologies may fail to materialise if these problems are not tackled.

Back on the race circuits, Alejandro Agag is adamant that there are no problems for Formula E where noise is concerned. As CEO of the company behind the race series, he argues that the distinctive sounds of these electric vehicles need nothing added to draw a young, tech-savvy audience that appreciates futuristic sounds like the pod racers in

Star Wars

.

Ben Burtt, who designed the pod racer's sound for

The Phantom Menace

, isn't quite so sure. The sound he created is actually a mix of dragster, Indycar – and yes, F1 engine – among other things. The trick, he says, was to lower the pitch of the sounds to create therumble of a powerful vehicle. That way, high frequencies in the original sound that were once beyond the range of the human ear became audible. This created a layered sound that seemed new, yet authentic and somehow familiar.

He suggests that Formula E teams should take the opportunity to create a signature sound, a sonic "brand" that would make them instantly identifiable. It's been done by manufacturers before, most recently by Harley-Davidson, with an all-electric motorcycle that generates a signature rumble that chopper fans know and love. Why not give these racing cars whatever flavour they want, says Burtt.

Yet Phillips insists there will be nothing added in Formula E. For better or worse, when the cars start up in Beijing, their soundtrack will be entirely unadulterated. And with millions of dollars in sponsorship at play, it's safe to say that the TV networks will be awake for the start of the race, whatever it sounds like

.

 

 

Sold on sounds

 

Look over a new car in the showroom and you probably do more than just admire its lines. Manufacturers believe that the sounds you hear influence your choice – albeit unconsciously – almost as much as a car's appearance or performance (see main story).

First climb in and slam the door. That pleasing "thunk" is all down to careful design. Safety legislation introduced about a decade ago required extra metal in the doors, and tests on consumers suggested that these new doors sounded tinny, implying the car was inferior. To compensate, designers changed the weight of other door components such as the lock mechanism, and tweaked things like seals and hinge designs to create a "clean" slamming sound with

just the right mix of frequencies to indicate quality

.

Next examine the trim. According to research funded by vehicle maker Renault,

the noise made by the dashboard

can also influence your view of a vehicle. The study, which found that 1 in 4 people tap on the dash as they look over a car, suggests that your decision might depend on the acoustics of the glove compartment.

Finally fiddle with the windows. Experiments testing consumer reactions to nine cars suggest that to create an impression of high quality, electric windows should sound

quiet and dull, and have a stable motor speed

when opened or closed. It seems we prefer our windows to be boring.

[WhackyWill]

There's big money been thrown at Formula E,