©Unsplash
An electric motor is quiet. For a carmaker that spent decades tuning how its engines sound, that silence is not a feature. It is a design problem.
A combustion engine speaks whether anyone planned it or not. Its note rises with revs and load, and over a century brands learned to shape it until the sound became part of the car's character. Remove the engine and the character has to come from somewhere else.
A composer and a Creative Director Sound
BMW's answer was to treat sound as something to be composed. According to the BMW Group's own announcement, IconicSounds Electric was developed by the film composer Hans Zimmer with Renzo Vitale, Creative Director Sound at the BMW Group. The pair first wrote a driving sound for the BMW Vision M NEXT concept, revealed in 2019, then for the Concept i4 in 2020. The work reached production cars in 2022: standard on the iX, optional on the i4.
The sound is a system, not a loop. It includes a start-up sound, a stop sound and a driving sound. In COMFORT mode it grows richer with load and speed. In SPORT it becomes a constant commentary on the drive. In ECO PRO it disappears entirely, because sometimes the right sound is none. The M version of the i4 adds energy and a sharper contrast between modes, "a fusion of superior power and flowing energy", in Vitale's words.
The silence was a brief. Someone had to answer it.
Two details worth noticing
First, BMW has a Creative Director Sound. The role sits inside the company, with a title and a remit. Sound is not a feature a supplier adds at the end of development. It belongs to the creative direction of the product.
Second, the result was composed, not picked from a library. A composer wrote for a specific object with a specific character, which is the argument we made about houses quietly building their own sound libraries: what you own, you can shape.
Why luxury houses should care
It would be easy to file this under automotive and move on. Every premium product makes sounds, though: a clasp, a zip, a cap, a case, a door. Most are the accidental result of materials and tolerances. Some, as we wrote about the sound of a Hermès bag closing, are engineered. BMW is the extreme case of the same logic, because the product's natural sound has gone and the brand has to decide what replaces it.
That makes the question useful for any house. If your product made a sound you had chosen, what would it be? Which qualities should it carry: precision, warmth, restraint, energy? And how should it behave across a boutique, a film and the object itself, so that all three belong to one family?
A caution: BMW has not published customer or sales data on these sounds, and we are not claiming any. What the case shows is a method. Give sound a creative owner, commission a composer, and design the sound to change with the product's behaviour.
At Maison Sonor, this is the work of original music and sound production: sonic assets written for a brand, and owned by it. Talk to us about your product.
