Principles of Active Sound Design for electric vehicles

Electric vehicles represent new challenges to vehicle acoustics. The exterior pedestrian warning is missing and the interior sound massively changed. Active Sound Design allows to implement exterior warning, to re-establish feedback to the driver, to realize emotional binding, to mask interior sound problems and to implement a stringent Brand Sound Strategy. Main requirements are that the resulting sounds are authentic (they have to be interpreted as coming from the vehicle in each driving condition), long-term applicable (they have to stay interesting for a long period of time) and clearly abstracted from known combustion engine sounds. The resulting Sound Design has to offer complex structures which go far beyond the simple coupling of the synthesis to the vehicle speed as required for exterior sound generation - a variety of different sounds and sound components have to be created and linked to the dynamic vehicle behavior. The principles of the resulting Sound Design approach will be discussed, and a sophisticated tool for Sound development and vehicle integration (the world's first system for interior electric vehicle sound generation as a series part of a vehicle) presented.