Month: September 2009

Once there was—Do you mark how the wistaria, sun-impacted on this wall here, distills and penetrates this room as though (light-unimpeded) by secret and attritive progress from mote to mote of obscurity’s myriad components? That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel—not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less: and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream.

–WF (via messianictime)

fiatluxemburg:

But why stop with the imagery:

Electric and hybrid cars, with little or no engine noise, are lauded for their silence, yet some groups including advocates for the blind say pedestrians may fail to notice them approaching. To address those safety concerns, transportation agencies in the U.S. and Japan may mandate artificial sounds for the vehicles.

“We fought for so long to get rid of that noisy engine sound,” said Tabata, Nissan’s noise and vibration expert. With electric cars, “we took a completely different approach and listened to composers talk music theory.” […]

Tabata was instructed about three years ago to re-create the sound of an engine. Given his years of work eliminating noise to enhance the driving experience, he said he balked at the suggestion of turning back the clock and adding anything evocative of an engine.

“We decided that if we’re going to do this, if we have to make sound, then we’re going to make it beautiful and futuristic,” Tabata said.

The company consulted Japanese composers of film scores. What Tabata and his six-member team came up with is a high- pitched sound reminiscent of the flying cars in “Blade Runner,” the 1982 film directed by Ridley Scott portraying his dystopian vision of 2019. [#]

It’s a pity that for lack of a better vision of the future our car companies are forced to just replicate a dystopian one.

And what will they do if it turns out that’s not the sound the flying cars actually make? Then they’ll really have their work cut out for them!

(I tried to warn people about all this once…)