Title | CREATING THE VOICE FOR THE FIAT 500E |
Brand | FIAT |
Product / Service | FIAT 500E |
Category | C02. Sound Design |
Entrant | SYN Tokyo, JAPAN |
Idea Creation | FIAT Turin, ITALY |
Production | SYN Tokyo, JAPAN |
Production 2 | RED ROSE PRODUCTIONS Milano, ITALY |
Name | Company | Position |
---|---|---|
Nick Wood | Syn Music | CEO & Creative Director |
Alan Mawdsley | Syn Music | Music Director |
Mathieu Kranich | Syn Music | Production Assistant |
Flavio Ibba | Red Rose Productions | CEO |
Rudi Rok | Rudi Rok | Voice Artist |
Sami Tammela | Rudi Rok | Sound Designer |
Lauri Laukkanen | Rudi Rok | Project Manager |
With our urban landscapes welcoming more and more electric vehicles, crossing the road will be both safer and more sonically pleasing with the in-vehicle engine sound of the New Fiat 500 electric car. In this project, we collaborated with a voice-artist based in Helsinki, Finland, and a partner music agency based in Milan, using the human voice to sculpt the engine sound and create something truly anthropomorphic for this classic Italian car. Marrying the innovative and the organic, we invoked the Japanese sensibility of ‘Wabi Sabi’ (meaning ‘Beauty in Imperfection’) to embrace the natural earthiness of the human voice and create an engine sound that breathes new life into the urban environment.
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Since 1957, The Fiat 500 ‘Cinquecento’ has been an icon of Italian engineering, style and design. Its reputation as a charming, cheeky and characterful car has earned it a well deserved position in Italian pop-culture. This is relevant to our engine sound, as it strides Italian tradition and a Global future. The sound of the vehicle reflects this, whilst also paying tribute directly to one of Italy’s greatest film composers, Nino Rota (The Godfather, La Strada, Romeo and Juliet).
We collaborated with a voice artist in Helsinki, who created the engine sound using his own voice, presenting us with a number of different tones and timbres to work with. As an engine sound (or AVAS sound) is an EU legal requirement for electric cars whilst driving under 20km/h, we had to work within very strict technical guidelines to create a sound that was both creatively excellent and legally compliant. Furthermore, this was met with the limitations of the internal speak in the car, which dictated the frequency response of our sounds. Part of the sound design process centred around how we could alter the pitch of the sound as the car accelerates, we were able to model this process using an automated pitch shift in order to keep the sound as smooth and melodic as possible.