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Music and cars go together like Page and Plant, Strummer and Jones, Marr and Morrissey and Auerbach and Carney. And Detroit, music and cars go together like Holland/Dozier/Holland, Kramer/Smith/Tyner and Atkins/Saunderson/May. If you’re from outside of 8 Mile, we may forgive you for not knowing the last trio of names, aka the Belleville Three, acknowledged Detroit pioneers of techno.
It’s little wonder that the city that introduced the world to the mechanized precision of the assembly line would also produce a rhythmically repetitive but infinitely innovative style of dance music that’s influenced everyone from Skrillex to Motor City homegirl Madonna. Intentionally mixing techno with automobile design, for the introduction of the 2013 Fusion, Ford tapped three Detroit-area techno artists to create original tracks using sounds produced in part by the car: slamming doors, the swish of windshield wipers, warning chimes and tones.
Ford allowed the three artists – Joshua Harrison, Keith Kemp and Tom Newman – access to the pre-production car and a “sound bank” of digital tones intended for Fusion. They took the raw audio material culled from the car to the studio and mixed it with synthesizers, samplers and other electronics to create original tunes featuring Fusion as a key element. A trunk slam is looped to simulate the pulsating kick-drum that’s a requisite part of Detroit Techno, the hushed hum of the Fusion Hybrid’s 2.0-liter engine becomes a brooding background tone and a seat-belt chime stands in as a syncopated percussion part.
Check out the tracks on SoundCloud. Or if you’re in Detroit over Memorial Day weekend, catch the Fusion trio and other techno artist at Movement Electronic Music Festival.
For Sounds of Fusion Track 2, Kemp mixed synthesizers, percussion and his voice with what Ford calls Chime B Soft Warning and Chime C Hard Warning with “texture sounds” recorded from interior of the vehicle. It’s the first time Kemp has used actual car sounds in a recording. “But it wouldn’t be uncommon for me to use the sound of a car or a train in one of my DJ sets,” he told Wired, “something that suggests motion or a machine."
As the product of an automotive environment (“My grandfather worked on the line for Ford,” he says, “and most of my friends’ families and my mom and dad worked in the car industry.”), Kemp feels that elements of the Motor City inevitably influenced Detroit’s music, and particularly techno. “One of the first Detroit techno artists, Juan Atkins, called himself Model 500,” he said. “And the founders of Detroit techno have said things about the strange dichotomy of the neighborhoods here: the industrial parks, the urban decay, the suburbs. It’s definitely not lost on the people that create music based on technology that they happened to be around the automotive industry.”
For a style of music that’s been around for almost three decades, Kemp feels that Detroit techno is finally getting its due by way of collaborations like this one with Ford and with Movement Electronic Music Festival. “People are excited to find out that there’s something beyond Motown that you could ascribe to Detroit musical history,” he added. “But do I hear the music at Tiger games? Definitely not.”
If techno artists and DJs mix a track to get a desired effect from listeners, Ford says that its engineers scrutinize the details of each synthetic sound ultimately produced by the Fusion to induce a specific reaction from the driver and passengers. Engineers create up to three sample “note tones” and perform listening group studies to establish the best sound for each task.
Audible warnings are designed to elicit an immediate response, and engineers employ four levels of severity. The harshest is a high-pitched staccato sound, while on the other end of the scale a three-note welcome chime is designed to deliver a “comfortable greeting.” Loud warnings, like those for Ford cross-traffic alert are intentionally strident, while sounds for the reverse alert, for example, are mellower to subtly notify without startling the driver.
For people who signal a turn while driving for miles, we suggest something very shrill.
