Today I learned that Hans Zimmer, known for his brilliant scores for movies such as Inception, Pirates of the Caribbean, and The Lion King, has also composed driving sounds for BMW. And they’re actually pretty good!
You can hear one coming to the company’s M version of its electric BMW i4 cars in this video (and jump to 1:30 if you just want to hear the sound).
And you can hear the driving sound that Zimmer composed for the BMW Vision M NEXT concept car in 2019 in this video:
These are cool, but they got The Verge staff wondering — what other composers should create sounds for cars? So we compiled just a few of our favorite composers into one list, and some ideas about what their car noises might sound like:
- John Williams (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, E.T., Jurassic Park): bombastic and inspirational
- Danny Elfman (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Men in Black, The Simpsons theme song): spritely vrooming, possibly with a horn section
- Clint Mansell (The Fountain, Black Swan, Mass Effect 3): intense, overwhelming, and somehow brings me to tears
- Nobuo Uematsu (known for his many compositions to the Final Fantasy series): gets me hyped to defeat some bad guys (after I am finished driving, of course)
- Trent Reznor (of the band Nine Inch Nails, and composer for The Social Network, Watchmen, and Soul [alongside Atticus Ross]): ambient, creeping dread
- Yoko Kanno (Cowboy Bebop, Vision of Escaflowne): perky, humorous, yet somehow as perfectly matched to the vehicle as a seatbelt
Please, car-makers: have more composers create drive sounds. I just gave you some excellent candidates you can consider.
In fact, tech industry in general, please hire them to make other sounds, too — you don’t always have ask to Zimmer to make things.
