Getting these sounds right is now more important than ever. That’s why the sound engineers at Nissan teamed up with experts at leading entertainment company Bandai Namco Group to develop in-car sounds for new Nissan models, starting with the 2021 Nissan Rogue and Pathfinder in the United States, the Nissan Note in Japan and the new Nissan Qashqai in Europe.
Bandai Namco is the third largest video game holding companies in Japan in terms of revenue and market capitalization after Sony and Nintendo. Bandai Namco Group is well-known not only for developing video game classics like Pac-Man, Tekken and Taiko Drum Master, but also for amusement facilities, toys, and hobby items such as Gundam. They were asked to help create a higher quality sound that uses pitch, tempo and tone to get information across.
Vehicles ‘speak’ to drivers all the time. Beeps and other sound alerts are common whether a door is ajar, or a seatbelt unfastened. It’s an important part of HMI and the “dialog” between the occupants and the car. Nissan wanted the ‘voice’ of its vehicles to have more personality and character, even to generate sounds with intention and emotion.
“We wanted to make it easier to understand the information in the car and provide an emotional tone so that people feel the Nissan brand,” says Hiroyuki Suzuki, Nissan’s lead engineer for in-car information sound design. “In game development, Bandai Namco’s sound creators develop sounds that simulate players’ intuitive understanding. We collaborated to create sounds that can help drivers have a similar intuitive understanding, in addition to creating sounds that will become synonymous with Nissan global models.”
In video games, there’re two types of sound: one creates the world view of the story the other is functional and give you feedback or warn you of danger,” said a Bandai speaker. In this project, they developed sounds that are both distinctly Nissan and functional.
As Nissan’s ergonomics test engineer explains: “Research has shown that urgency depends on the frequency of the sound, and that severity depends on the frequency itself. In order to intuitively understand what types of sounds are used, each sound is divided into functional groups and differentiated by tone.”
Nissan engineers also had to consider the speaker itself, and a new high-quality speaker fits under the dashboard close to the driver and is optimized for the new information soundscape, making warning sounds distinctive from the sound from the audio speakers.
Listen to sounds before/after in this video.
