Summarize the text
Asses the text
Reflect on the texts relevance to your research topic

¹⁾ Gijs Mom presents a concise history of the ways in which sound becomes an important element of car design. This essay outlines the development of a closed car, and a clear timeline of how specific elements of car design were preferred over others throughout the 1920-40s. The essay also discusses the ways in which car culture and design influence one another, with car owners preferring to own cars that could be used to travel around the country and ones that both enabled and projected specific lifestyles. Notions of cars being cheaper then commuting by train or bus as well as them being desirable as a protective social 'cocoon' let to designs where the outside world was inhibited and a personal comfort space was created.

This writing has a remarkable amount of primary sources and is pulling from a large amount of early information on car sound, which I have not yet found in my other sources. These primary sources are in themselves very useful and to have them contextualized is very useful to me as well. The most useful thing for me is to see the ways in which cars are being discussed in terms of music so early on, and the realization that the beginning of my topic in history coincides with the creation of the closed car.

Mom's history presents me with a starting moment, when did sound design begin and in which ways are the design principles relevant to the car culture in relation to sound we have today. The early history of car marketing and lingo really reinforce this idea with many aspects of the car sound being referenced and discussed with musical terms. This essay is a very useful resource both in its construction of early car sound design as well as its introduction to many sources around the ways cars were being thought of and talked about.

Its the RUSH
²⁾ Tomie Hahn writes about the experiences of field research during two events, watching the makeup being applied to a Japanese traditional dancer and her experience interviewing and watching monster truck rallies. She discusses the difficulty of being able to communicate the sensual experiences of these events and how language, and an implied sense of objectivity when writing as an ethnographer are at odds with these experiences. She discusses the importance of direct sense experiences in these events and how she encounters feelings that exceed an easy way of communicating them in a scholarly manner. Hahn says that these emotional responses to these events have the potential to be informative and are under used as way to define identity in genres that are about extreme experience.

Defining these extreme sense experiences as a rush is a very apt way of contextualizing them, especially when it comes to monster trucks. Briefly Hahn mentions the guttural way the word 'monster' is said in an interview, and it made me hear it in my head a specific way, that i believe is accurate to what she is getting at, these events are a type of experiential culture and writing about it in a way that doesn't take into account the writers own body understates the very nature of the culture that it is. A bodily mode of talking about these is vital to communicating how the function as a cultural event.

Monster trucks are alone a component of car culture, and I was expecting this essay to be more directly about monster truck culture itself. This essay is still very useful to my research because it heightens the importance of me discussing sound culture and as embodied experience. I can write many perspectives about the ways that people enjoy engine noise but the embodied experience of it is just as vital as the sonic experience of it.

³⁾

Krebs takes a survey into existing writing about car sound, from the perspective of history as well as from the field of sound studies. He details that most of the study about car sound have to do with two main topics, the reduction and control of sound in cars and the development of a individualistic car culture. This includes the development of quite cars as well as the development of radio in cars, something that only becomes well developed after being able to reduce how loud the car is while driving. Krebs also details the ways in which research has been dedicated to the ways in which car culture has developed with predominate themes of 'cocooning' and 'sonic envelopes' both of these have to do with the development of private aural spaces. lastly there is an observation made that there is little research being done around the act of listening in relationship to cars, little research is being done about the sounds car make, rather then about how to reduce it. He notes that the largest complaint about urban noise is car noise, and it represents the greatest need for creating better sonic ecosystems.

This essay is well timed with the development of electric cars, many of the complaints mentioned are being addressed today. Additionally the observations about sonic space and how car noises are frequently artificially generated (even on electric vehicles) is a very interesting notion to me.

This is a useful essay for me because it outlines a hole that I am hoping to fill in my own research. It is informative to see that I am not the only one that thinks there is a lack of insight specifically about sound and cars without one of the above goals in mind, I am interested in sound culture in the complexities that it currently exists under and the ways that it represents an imperfect relationship to our culture and society.

⁴⁾

Schirmacher describes how active noise control works. This is a technology that is used in cars to reduce engine noise and create a quieter interior and exterior environment. active noise control works by recording the sounds that a car engine makes, taking that information and feeding it into a computer which has an algorithm to produce a sound wave that is played from a speaker that cancels out the unwanted sound. This can be selectively filtered to produce a difference in the sound or used to make an overall quieter sound. These systems can be installed inside or outside of a car. Additionally Schirmacher details how this technology can be installed into existing cars and how new cars can be designed with additional measuring tools, microphones and speakers in preparation to use this technology.

This technology has wide applications in both the reduction of car noise but also in the ability to change and customize car sounds. In figure 4 there is a chart showing various cylinder counts from 4 cylinder to 12 and the differences in their sound profile is visually easy to understand. It is clear that this technology can be used to selectively remove parts of the engine sound profile to match that of a higher cylinder count, something that would make a inexpensive car sound like one would expect an expensive one to sound like.

I have a number of readings that I have found that are about how various part of car sound technologies work. It is useful for me to know how active noise control is done in newer cars. This technology is already having an effect on the ways interior car spaces sound as well as on our urban soundscapes. I am unsure how this effects culture but I am hoping to read more papers like this to get a better understanding of the technical side of how car sounds are designed.

⁵⁾

The sound of cars is classified into 5 types- Powerful, Pleasant, Metallic, Luxurious, and Sporty. In the experiment various car owners were played recordings of engine acceleration sounds from different models of cars and asked to score the sound on various negative to positive metrics associated to the quality of the sound. The metrics were such things as smooth – rough, simple – luxurious, and strong – weak. The answers we used to build classifications of each cars sound. Additionally each of the drivers were classed based off the kind of car they own. The results showed that the luxurious and sporty were clearly separate classes and that drivers from different classes had different notions of what the qualities of various sounds were. These differences mostly followed class lines and indicates that the kind of sound ones own car makes effects the perceptions of the quality of other classes of car sounds.

This kind of study is very much about the relationship that car owners have to cultural identity and brand identity. I find the classes of car sounds used here to be related to marketing and market metrics. This is interesting because it is difficult to separate cars from consumerism and the dominate forces that lead to car design are mostly about desirability and not functionality.

This study gives another hint at the kind of design that goes into the manufacturing side of car culture. Early in the paper it says the 'right sound for right car' and this is exactly the kind of information this study is looking to demystify; what is the sound people look for to match their perceptions of a car? This paper was very likely used for research by major car manufacturers and the language, and effects of this kind of design see ripples in the culture we live in today. i imagine this like a kind of feedback loop, where the design of a cars sound is used to make it 'match' our perceptions of it and this overtime warps our perceptions to feed back into further design into desirability.

⁶⁾

Widmer presents a history of car references in rock and roll music. The theme of cars is a dominate theme in rock and roll with it being a key element of the freedom and lifestyle the genre presents. The history of car references are traced back prior to rock and roll to Blues music and the ways in which black musicians discuss the Ford motor company and the relations black workers had to the production and symbology of black cars. Rock and role continues this connection with cars being emblematic of a lifestyle with Cadillac cars being compared to women and are emblematic of an idealized post WWII lifestyle. The parallels to sex and beauty are embedded in the metaphors common in rock and role music. The essay ends by discussing Elvis Presley and Check Berry and how they lived out the lifestyle they presented in their music, both owning many cars throughout their careers. Both also outwardly presented their cars as status symbols of being successful musicians.

This history presents an interesting moment in post war America where the dominate music was presented to lower class individuals with a forward thinking mentality of upward mobility. This is represented by presenting a car dependent lifestyle that was synonymous with freedom and was a cultural ideal at that moment in history. This relationship generated strong brand and aesthetic relationships, with the Cadillac frequently being openly presented as a ideal for presenting yourself as successful in life. Ownership of a Cadillac is also presented as sexually desirable, which further enhanced its appeal with young males who were one of the main listeners to rock and roll music.

I don't think rock and roll is in itself within the scope of my work, but I do think it is an important contextualization of the ways the cars engage with culture. I am interested in a more literal car sound culture, rather then its use as a symbol in music. I do think this is relevant though because in many ways this fuels the nostalgia that classic cars carry today. One of the major introductions of cars in culture was this music and it was the beginnings of integrating cars into people images of self and the ways they have come to represent an aspirational element of lifestyle.

⁷⁾

Marling presents a specific perspective on the car, one that is visual construction designed to engage the senses, this is the car of the television age. Throughout the 1950 to the 1980s cars were mainly marketed through television, an object to be looked at, and the esthetics of cars are largely effected by this shift. Again the Cadillac is center in the discussion, presenting a vibrant pink car, with chrome accoutrements that is made to look like a piece of aviation technology. The importance of aviation is predominate in the design, though largely just for looks the cars were represented as aerodynamic and plane like, a metaphor for the ways they they drive smoothly and 'fly' across the landscape when driven. these design elements effected every aspect of the car, from its shape and color, the use of chrome to the sound and ways that people envisioned themselves in them.

This essay presents cars as pieces of artwork. It discusses the idea that cars were marketed on circular pedestals and rotated for viewers to experience at car shows, but this action had no resemblance to the act of driving them. This really gets at the idea that cars are not being presented even as something that someone drives, arguably the primary point, but instead something to be looked at and experienced. This shift in design seems to correlate with the increase in sound design, where the elements of a cars sound have less to do with the mechanical function but instead more to do with the idealization of what people want them to sound like.

Like the above essay on rock and roll this essays does a good job contextualizing cars as symbols. I now have a resource to use for both the sound elements of American culture as well as the visual elements that a re present in advertising and television.

⁸⁾ Charting the parallels in the early film and car industries, cars and film had intense links. Cars enabled the film industry, with cars being the primary means that viewers went to the theater, and in the case of drive in theaters, the primary way to experience them. The escapism of film and cars are interlinked, with the ability for audiences to escape the sounds and engagement with the outside world, experiencing the sound of air conditioning and radio more then the local environment. This presents car owners with a view of the world where the outside world is ugly and bothersome and this feeds back into the escapism of film.

The implications of an isolated interior space in a car are interesting. This essay reinforces this idea in the ways this manifests in film. The essay presents Star Wars as 'hot rods in space' and this makes me think of the 'cocooning' I described earlier, there is a notion of isolation and a construction of a escape from the outside world. In the case of space this is a literal silence of the outside and I think it is an informative metaphor for the idealized sonic space inside of a car.

⁹⁾

The way that we contextualize sound, as noise, sound or music is deeply effected by context. In many contexts, especially ones outside of the control of the listener all sounds can be noise. Much of our sonic experience, unless actively listening or in control of the sound becomes a framing of the space we are in, and that information is used to determine how safe and familiar we feel in those spaces. Trotta uses the example of soldiers in wartime, when they hear gunfire, even distantly it contextualizes the listeners in space, all relative to the sound, and also determines the degree of safeness felt by those listeners, based off of how far away that sound is. Additionally music playing outside our homes, in situations where the sound is carried in invades a sense of privacy and is primed to be received very negatively and enters the realm of noise. This ability to control our living environments and the sonic contexts we encounter is a precursor to enjoyment of sounds as music.

This essay is a good introduction to thinking about sound as both a social element as well as a contextualizing element for our bodies in space.I enjoy the way music contexts are also built up to and how that makes sense that degrees of agency and control are very important to hearing things as music.

This is a very useful essay for my work because it gives a sort of definition to when things are noise, sound, and music. If people hear car sounds as music (or as noise) the context of that experience is very much important and I will be discussing those terms under the language of agency and consent.

¹⁰⁾