Hollywood to the rescue for BMW’s future EV sounds

Hans Zimmer has, quite literally, the coolest office in the world.

Picture a bordello, a bar and a high-tech, Blade Runner set all mashed into one – with an actual Oscar statuette tucked in one corner for good measure, and you’re only part of the way there.

You’d have a nice office, too, if you were worth US$200 million, of course, but his is extra cool because of what he does there – composing the music that gives mood and emotion to some of the world’s most famous movies.

They include the most recent Blade Runner film, another Ridley Scott hit called Gladiator, all of Christopher Nolan’s films, including The Dark Knight and Inception, The Pirates of the Caribbean series, Kung Fu Panda and The Lion King, which won him that Oscar for Best Score.

We were allowed into his incredible inner sanctum because BMW are now paying him a no doubt staggering amount of money to give mood, emotion and sexy sound to its EVs, and in particular its hugely sporty and exciting new Vision M Next concept, the first EV to wear the fabled M badge.

It helps that Zimmer is a huge car fan, and that he grew up in Munich, where he would, as a child, sit on his balcony and listen for the reassuring and singular sound of his parents’ BMW returning home.

But he’s also quite excited about the challenge of doing something so new, and so cool.

“It’s what I have done my entire life,” Zimmer explains.

“I’ve done nothing but give characters something that goes beyond what you see; beyond vision.

“The only reasons you have music in films is you’ve run out of things to say, and run out of beautiful images to show.”

Giving character to cars, which used to create plenty of beautiful noise of their own but now require artificial enhancement as they move away from internal combustion engines, was not something Zimmer found difficult.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” he grins. “We’re using BMW, and they’re giving us the tools to create a new sense of music, a new music that hasn’t existed before, and a new instrument to play it with.

“However refined and wonderful it is, the petrol engine is still just a mechanical thing, and this moment of changing all that, of creating new worlds in a car, is one I’m very excited about.

“In the very near future, your car will be able to speak to you in a beautifully customised way.”

The invention of the sounds the BMWs of the future will make when you fire them up, or accelerate, will make you, the driver, into a performer, who uses the throttle to “express himself with emotion”, as Zimmer enthuses.

So far, Zimmer has come up with two sci-fi-esque soundscapes – one of which is pitched as “the noise every BMW will soon make when you press the Start button”.

It’s a rising, choral, thrilling sound, inspired by human voices and a spiralling glass sculpture in Munich that Zimmer liked the look of.

The even more exciting soundtrack is the one has has created for the Vision M Next, which includes its start-up hum, a warp-speed-like acceleration tone and then a Boost function (listen to it at the end of the video embedded in this article).

His idea was to make the car sound “like it is accelerating into the future all the time”. 

And to do so he incorporated something called a Shepard Tone., which is an aural illusion of continuously swelling sound, used to build tension.

Imagine a sonic barber’s pole, which seems to continuously rise in pitch, but never actually reaches a crescendo.

It’s probably best if you just click the video link and have a listen yourself, but that’s how Zimmer explains it, and as he played it for us through the vast and deeply bassy speakers in his absurdly cool office, it sounded pretty damn impressive.

Finally, it seems, EVs might sound as exciting, and fast, as they feel to drive.