Weekly sounds: Apple Watch k-chit sound and Ford Mustang fake noise

After some months of small activity, welcome again to Weekly Sounds, a series of quick articles to help you stay up to date with the best resources about Sound Communication.

Weekly sounds

In a recent interview Jony Ive describes the noise created by Apple Watch while latching and unlatching automatically. In his own words:

But listen as it closes […]

It makes this fantastic k-chit.

Despite of somebody (Apple fan boys) who probably is ready to create a new (sad) music genre called k-chit which can be played with the watch, this sentence shows a growing interest of Apple in Product Sonification, or Product Sound Design, if you prefer.

A matter of audio branding: Ford Mustang fakes noise for engine sound. As cars technologies are becoming more and more efficient, the sounds created by engines are getting quieter and quieter. Indeed the new Mustang EcoBoost is equipped with the Active Noise Control System, which processes the initial sound of the new car in order to play a louder, noisier and more Ford Mustang-like sound for the drivers experience.

The campaign at IndieGoGo has ended today, but Core is an interesting new device moving in the huge market of wireless speakers. Nevertheless features such as bluetooth, multi-room networking, NFC, 12 hours battery life and, most of all, the promise of providing a truly stereo experience with a single and small speaker, show a product which properly summarizes the new direction of audio tech companies in these last years.

I guess many people is asking the same old question when they have to record in no-sound-proof spaces. How Effective Are Portable Vocal Booths? reports a test on 10 products with a price ranging from under £100 to almost £300.

In the field of spatial sound a new solution is creating a log of buzz. It’s 4DSOUND, a set of devices in Ableton Live allowing a novel spatial control of sound in a 3d space. You can watch this technology in action in the video below and read more at Spatial Audio, Explained: How the 4DSOUND System Could Change How You Hear [Videos].

Sound is becoming more and more a solution to build a connection among diverse devices, like in the case of Toffee, a prototype created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, which includes a set of cheap small microphones mounted on a tablet/smartphone and an app which have the ability to detect the location of your fingers touching the tabletop on which the device is placed. You can watch the official presentation of the project below and read more at Sonic sensors let you control tablets with table taps

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Gianpaolo D'Amico