5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 11 July 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Jonny and Richard answer listeners’ questions about the music EVs should play as warning sounds, favourite trainers, Jonny’s air-con threshold, the most astonishing vehicles still in day-to-day use and spurious excuses to buy cars.
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0:00.0 | I'm Richard Porter. |
0:02.7 | I'm Johnny Smith. |
0:04.1 | And this is on the other side of things, the Smith and Sniff spin-off in which we answer your questions. |
0:13.0 | Hi, guys. |
0:14.0 | Hi, hi, guys. |
0:15.9 | Welcome to On the Other Side of Things, our Friday spin-off in which we answer your questions. |
0:20.3 | Yeah. |
0:20.8 | We've had a message from a listener called Tim, Tim Baker, who says, hello, you couple of flutie tunes. |
0:29.0 | I'm very lucky to have a career as a professional musician and sonic artist. |
0:33.1 | But if I'm honest, my first passion is cars. |
0:35.7 | I'm toying with the idea of how to combine these two passions |
0:38.9 | and I realised that my dream job would be resident musician as a car manufacturer. You might be thinking, |
0:45.1 | what would a car manufacturer do with a resident musician? But bear with me. Modern EVs are so |
0:49.7 | quiet, they have to be equipped with external speakers and play audio through them to be heard by pedestrians, particularly for those who are visually impaired. The sound they play is from a digital synthesiser that is controlled with the throttle pedal and modulated by what the wheels and gearbox are doing while driving. You could make that synth play any kind of sound, literally anything. You could use AI to take the key sonic moments |
1:12.9 | from a Jimmy Hendrix guitar solo and a Rheitha Franklin vocal track and a Joey Jorderson drum solo |
1:18.5 | and use those audio samples in the car synthesizer. And in my opinion, the people currently |
1:24.2 | designing the audio at the moment are sleeping on the job. The best example I've heard is some of the new Porsches, |
1:29.7 | which play a sonorous tone that's halfway between an 80s cyberpunk swoosh |
1:33.5 | and a classic flat six engine, but still not exactly imaginative. |
1:37.8 | My question to you is this. |
1:39.7 | We now have the capability to make cars sound like anything. |
1:43.5 | So what would you do if you were the chief developer of external audio at a major car manufacturer? |
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