A well-written score, finely tuned instruments
Because sound design is all about teamwork. It requires vision, technical skill, patience and attention to detail. It brings together many Renault Group disciplines, including those in the Product, Design and Engineering departments. It also calls on outside partners and experts to arrive at the creation of a VSP. It is worth remembering that the partnership between Renault Group and Ircam began in 1994, well before Renault opted for electric as its future in the automotive world. Since then, it would appear that this historic link has helped to inspire several vocations: Laurent Worms and other employees learned their trade at Ircam before joining Renault in the cutting-edge field of applied acoustics.
My role is to set a course. I rely on the rich feedback from our customers and on current trends to write the sound specifications that describe the desired environments and evocations that will chime with our brand identity. Laurent Worms
For the sounds of future electric Renault models, the historic link with earlier productions has to be maintained, and developed. Ircam has skills in basic research, acoustics, music and sound that are so appreciated for this type of industrial application and its baggage of constraints. Under the leadership of Nicolas Misdariis, Director of Research and manager of the PDS teams, and Andrea Cera, a composer and sound designer who has worked with the PDS teams for many years on, among other things, these issues of sound design for vehicle, the work was able to begin. The first stage of a project of this importance consists of understanding the technical, ergonomic, functional and identity aspects of the industrial requirements. In other words, it needs to answer the question: what is the required and desirable personality for the external sound? These initial data are relayed in briefing sessions on these various aspects, using media such as words, images, sound libraries and even noises themselves that express, each in their own way, the evocations and emotions that are the target of the coming sound design effort.
This work is part of a long history of collaboration and it benefits from the feedback and experience from over ten years. This means we can define and consolidate strong concepts such as intrusiveness. The goal is to meet an essential need of sound ecology: to make the sound as unobtrusive as possible inside the vehicle, for greater comfort. Nicolas Misdariis