Liesl Varga began her career scoring experimental theatre in Budapest before a chance commission, a set of alert tones for a hospital ventilator, led her into the curious world of product sound. For the past four years she has led the acoustic team at Vessant, the young electric carmaker based outside Turin, where she was asked to give its first grand tourer a voice. We met in the company's anechoic chamber, a room so quiet you can hear your own pulse.
I asked her first why an electric car needs to make any sound at all. Partly it is regulation, she explained. At low speeds, silent vehicles are a genuine danger to pedestrians, cyclists and anyone with impaired sight, so the law requires an external tone. But the deeper reason is emotional. Drivers use sound to understand what a machine is doing. Take it away completely, she said, and people feel strangely disconnected, as if they were steering by remote control.
Where does one even begin composing for a car? Varga laughed at the question. Her team started not with synthesisers but with field recordings: wind through a pine forest, the hum of an overhead tram cable in Milan, a cellist tuning her lowest string. They were searching for sounds that suggested power without aggression. The final external tone, she told me, is built around a slowly shifting chord that rises gently in pitch as the car gains speed.
Composing for the cabin
Inside the cabin, the challenge is different. Here, Varga explained, the goal is less to announce than to accompany. The car produces a subtle synthetic texture beneath the road noise, which responds to acceleration and regenerative braking. Drivers can turn it off entirely, and around a third do. She seems unbothered by that figure. The best compliment, she told me, is when someone says they never noticed the sound until they drove a different car and missed it.
An engine used to be a kind of accidental orchestra. Now nothing is accidental. Every sound in the car is a decision someone made. — Liesl Varga
I wondered whether she ever feels nostalgic for combustion engines, with their famous howls and burbles. She admitted to a certain fondness, particularly for old Italian twelve-cylinder cars, which she described as the loudest opera ever written. But she resists the idea that electric cars should imitate them. Faking an engine, she argued, would be like printing wood grain onto plastic. The more interesting task is to discover what an electric machine sounds like on its own terms.
Her favourite detail is one most owners will hear only a handful of times. When the car finishes charging overnight, it plays a short three-note phrase through its external speakers, recorded from a glass harmonica she found in a Viennese antiques shop. Varga says she wanted the car to say good morning. It is, she concedes, entirely unnecessary. That is precisely why she fought so hard, through several budget meetings, to keep it.
As we left the chamber, she paused at the door and asked me to listen to the ordinary world rushing back in: the air conditioning, a distant forklift, voices in the corridor. We are surrounded by designed sound, she said, most of it designed badly. Her ambition is modest and enormous at once, that the cities of the electric age might be quieter, and that whatever sound remains might actually be worth hearing.
