Polestar handed me a Polestar 2 and a simple problem: an electric car has no engine to listen to, so what does it sound like? I made the car itself the instrument. Using robots, Arduino-driven machines and electromagnetic field recorders, I pulled the hidden sounds out of the vehicle and built them into a composition, two films and a playable installation.

01 The car as instrument

A battery-electric car is missing the obvious noise, the combustion engine, so I went under the hood. The chassis and body panels became percussion. An EMF recorder made the car's inaudible electromagnetic fields hearable, the same bzzz-krrr you get when a phone sits on a speaker. Motor control circuits were driven directly to produce tones. Each of these became a voice in the track "Sound of Soul (Polestar)".

02 Film: Chroma Horizons

Electric images for an electric car. With ZEITGUISED / FYI Henriksson.
Shot at the Hyperbowl in Munich on a large LED volume driven by Unreal Engine, the set becomes a canvas painted with virtual light in real time. Most virtual sets imitate real places. This one treats the space as its own material: a minimal scene of colour and sound feeding back into each other, physical and virtual collapsing into a single image.
Credits: Idea by Emanuel Mugrauer. Production by Julian Adenauer. Sound by Moritz Simon Geist. Visuals by ZEITGUISED / FYI Henriksson.

03 Playing the car live

(kleineres Video oder ein Foto der Instrumente, bewusst sekundär)
For the live version I built playable instruments from the car's own parts. Motor circuits, coils and mechanical components were wired up and triggered so the track could be performed physically, as a set of real instruments rather than a studio recording.

04 The interactive console

For Polestar's showrooms we built a touch console. On a tablet, visitors trigger the car's sounds, mix the beats and switch between the films themselves. The passive display becomes something you play. The disassembled drivetrain components sit on plinths beside it, so you can see the exact parts the sounds came from