How The Automotive Industry Shaped Electronic Music

Here’s some snippets of a talk I gave with Jeff Staple for Re:Mix Lab & Wired Magazine

When the industrial manufacturing and the automotive industry first arrived, it brought with it a bunch of different noises. Explosions from combustion engines, oscillations for the gears turning. For the first people to hear the sound of an engine, it truly sounded like something from the future.

Fast forward 100 years and drastic growth spurts in both creativity and have helped pushed sound design along. Listen to how Hollywood portrays two futuristic sounds. It’s also important just to mention that big machines, create big sounds. It’s basic physics, if these machines behaved quietly then it would be anti-climactic from a cinematic experience.

“The Sentinels” from the Matrix Trilogy (1999 — 2003)

“Optimus Prime & Megatron” from the Transformers Trilogy (2007 — 2011)

Now take a listen to Skrillex’s “Kill Everybody In The World” (2010)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU6vpaBGuA8

Can you start to hear the resemblance in sounds? We naturally expect future cars to continue along the same path, and sound like the modern day gasoline-combustion engines. Electric cars make so little noise, that hollywood sound engineers have had to design moving parts to create noise in them. It’s a safety issue, a blind person may not be able to hear them coming down the street.