Designing a Soundscape for the Cars of the Future

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 August 2022

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Electric cars, compared to cars with internal-combustion engines, are nearly silent, which can present a danger to cyclists and pedestrians. So car companies are turning to sound engineers to craft artificial soundtracks for things like backing up, or starting the engine. John Seabrook, who writes often about music, reported on the composers and designers who are building a new soundscape for the streets and highways of America. Plus, a visit with Ada Limón, who was recently named the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate. Limón lives in Kentucky, and in 2018 she took the Radio Hour to her favorite racetrack, and spoke about her lifelong love of horses.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.6	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:13.9	John Seabrook has written for The New Yorker on many subjects, but he's a particular expert on pop music, how in today's music business, a track is built
0:22.7	layer by layer by an entire team of composers and producers. Recently, John took that close attention
0:29.5	to the process of making songs to a very different kind of sound environment. Here's John Seabrook,
0:35.7	taking a little trip with our producer, Gauphan and Putabwelle.
0:40.8	So let's imagine we're walking through London in the 19th century. You know, it's 1859, and it's a beautiful
0:49.4	sunny day, and we're strolling down the high street.
0:55.5	What do we hear?
0:57.9	What does it sound like all around us?
1:01.6	It's going to sound pretty different than walking through New York City sounds today.
1:04.1	I think first of all,
1:05.0	you're going to hear the clip-clop of horses' hooves,
1:08.1	and you're going to hear wagon wheels,
1:12.9	you're going to hear church bells, You're going to hear church bells.
1:18.3	You're going to hear running water, probably. You're going to hear more animal and bird sounds than we can hear today. You're going to hear blacksmiths hammers, which have a particular sound they go ping ping king ping
1:30.3	ping they kind of have a ping ping ping ping sound and if you grew up at a farm which I did you
1:37.0	you get used to that sound and maybe the what people wore of course they didn't really have sneakers
1:41.9	so the sound of the feet probably hitting the pavements,
1:47.1	the boot heels, are probably like a constant staccato, low-level kind of click, click, click.
1:57.1	So in 1860, the very next year, there was a Belgian engineer who patented the very first commercially successful internal combustion engine.
2:08.4	And that was going to change the urban soundscape profoundly.
	...

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