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Reading a lot of the comments it seems that most people here are keen to have otherwise quiet cars fitted with fake sounds. While I appreciate there's a safety aspect to making some sort of sound for pedestrians, I am actually looking forward to a future that makes cities and heavy traffic areas both quieter and cleaner. If you live in such areas, this would be a great quality of life improvement and dare I say, may improve property values in such places.
I'd hate to think that 20 years from now I'll still be subject to morons deciding to delight the neighbourhood at 2am with their overblown engine sounds.
Yes! I've already written NHTSA and US DOT about getting these synthetic noises banned. The more people who do the same, the more likely it'll get noticed.
Now, we just have to figure out how to include motorcycles...
Having lived in apartments on many busy roads in my life the main source of noise from cars is tyre noise, not engine noise.
People like the sound of engines. It’s interesting to me that you have issue with car exhaust notes but not police or other sirens. In urban environments you typically hear sirens more than vehicle noise, at least in my experiences in SF.
Maybe don’t be concerned with things that don’t really matter. Likely real engine sounds aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Unless I'm missing something, these sounds only occur inside the car. Can you explain how that affects you?
By far the worst offenders when it comes to neighborhood car sound are EV’s. They have decided across the board to blast the most bone chilling drone imaginable every time they are backing up a driveway or driving at low speed – you know, the kind of thing that happens in neighborhoods all the time.
The tone itself is the worst part. It’s as if it was specifically engineered by top audio scientists to be as repulsive as possible (that’s probably exactly what happened), then they turned the volume dial up to 11 so it’s still grating even in your house several doors down. I believe Tesla led the charge here, but now they’re all equally guilty of disturbing the peace and wanton noise pollution.
Just play a nice v8 sound at a reasonable volume for gosh sake!
I wonder if they could go the other way and use loudspeakers for external active noise cancellation.
Yeah Skeuomorphic EVs is a bad idea.
If you liked this, y'all owe it to yourselves to checkout AngeTheGreat's channel. It's truly amazing work.
Absolutely — the procedurally generated fluid-sim engine sound generator is just wild: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bJTkBsiTPc.
For a less scientific approach LAxemann has some interesting videos as well. He uses software synthesizers to create the sounds. His introductory video is quite interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afvKUTIL4D8
He has other examples and updates on his channel as well.
Looks like this uses soundbanks instead of actually simulating an engine like AngeTheGreat's simulator. The author of this one has published their source code here https://github.com/markeasting/engine-audio
Tangentially: Does anyone know where to find a collection of the low speed sounds emitted by electric vehicles (in the US at least)? I'd be interest to hear the different approach different manufacturers have taken.
OT, sound simulator related:
I recall a thunder simulator (generator?) from years ago. You could draw/modify a “line” representing the ground surface, give it a few seconds, and it would output thunder. Early-ish internet days, Java applet. Might have been on a university web site.
I tried searching fairly recently and came up empty handed. Is it possible that anyone here on HN might remember this and have a reference? I would settle for a paper.
reminds me of this masterpiece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT-sKtR970
I touch Theta param in the left part of it, and the sound disappears, all the numbers go mad into infinity and then become NaN. Also there's no sound if none is selected in controls, but changing anything in controls makes the same effect -- all params spiral into infinity. Not fun.
More fun than I expected. Now I want more engine sounds. I wonder how hard it would be to contribute new engine models. Like, what is the recording process and processing required to build the source sounds.
This is great!
For a game I was making years ago, I tried to make a “crowd noise” generator. As in for a football/soccer match.
But it was not my skillset and I failed miserably.
Does anyone know of something that might get me started?
Digital sound is criticized but creating fake analog sound is celebrated.
[1] Hyundai Ioniq 5 N https://youtu.be/HZczpFsv9ZY
[2] The Secret To Making Your Car Sound Like An Old F1 Racer Is Found Under Pressure https://jalopnik.com/the-secret-to-making-your-car-sound-lik...
I’ve got one of these. It’s called a toddler.
Reminds me of the sound racer v8[0]. This gismo was a lot more fun that people gave it credit for -- it read the rpm from the 12v signal in the power and modulated a v8 over fm. Had a blast in my little four cylinder sounding like a beefy v8!
Anyone know good tutorials for simulating drone/airplane propeller sound?
Automation (game) does a pretty good job of simulating sounds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkU5KkF_L4I
Partially related: I love the sounds of electric vehicles. They're so futuristic and weird! If you close your eyes, you can imagine a spaceship instead of a car.
It would be interesting to see an engine sound sim with various malfunctions, sort of like the call-in part of Click and Clack.
Just this afternoon my daughter asked why a car was making a particular sh-hiss between some cylinder beats and I speculated it was a small head gasket leak between cylinders allowing some of the ignited gases to expand into exhaust. Maybe it was something else though, maybe crispy cooked feline remains against a fan belt.
Add buttons for people on mobile?
I'd like to hear a gas turbine sound simulator. It would be cool to hear a T700 (Blackhawk engine) enter the critical RPM ranges for example.
I liked to lie to people that my big old modular Thinkpad (the one with two bays for batteries, disk drives, cdroms, etc) had a tiny gas generator module in it to charge up the batteries, then I'd mime pulling the start cord, while surreptitiously playing a loud audio file of a chainsaw starting up and running, to prove it.
This would be great to load up onto an RPi and put into a kids toy. Maybe use it to pimp up one of those toddler steering wheel sets.
wow, most of the time the engine sounds of cars designed to go 0-100 quickly sounds super generic, but this i can actually get to sound like two different cars i've owned. I could almost get it to sound like a Lancer Evo X but there's no blowoff or turbo sound... maybe in the next version!
This is amazing. I think a small amount of window dressing would make this a classic page people bookmark and return to frequently just for fun. Especially if that make it mobile friendly.
Like even just two pedals and two flappy shifters on screen with all those other tools hidden behind a collapse or whatnot.
See other similar funny stuff like electric drill sound simulation using phaseplant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1Ifle4q7Tw
I managed to get negative RPM - cool!
Very cool, get to top RPM in gear 6 and drop down to gear 1 for an ear-rending shriek.
Pretty cool!
Downshifting under braking doesn't feel accurate. Most fast cars brake like 2-4x their acceleration rate, but in this sim, the braking feels more like 100x.
The sound of an engine under decel is just as awesome as acceleration.
You can sort of "heel and toe" with the space and b keys, while shifting down. Use the same finger for both keys for added realism.
Around 5000 RPM I get transported to the back seat of a two-stroke Trabant struggling to reach 70 km/h on a mild incline.
Tapping on the controls is broken. Typed text in gear number field is erased immediately.
The app sounds fun. Excited to try it again later.
I love that when you get to max RPM in 6th gear and then just downshift to 1st you hit comically high RPMs!
This is truly music to my ears!
hmm, I either don't know how to use it or it doesn't work in Safari
Absolutely delightful!
This is way more fun than it has any right to be.
Fun! Would be funner if it handled the money shift.
My 4 year old is loving this
The smile on my face...
This is really good!
This is way too fun.