The Kia Instrument
kia.com
kia.com
I'm a sucker for these kinds of self-contained synths (think OP-1, I owned 2 at one point), and it would be neat if Kia actually made this. Doesn't look like the plan(?) but maybe i missed it?
I would be really surprised if something like this took off in the greater synth market.
Also different car markets / segments (small, midsized vs large suv)
The RAV4 is noticeably smaller and cheaper, but still an SUV and seemed like a useful benchmark.
PS: They sold 75,129 in 2020, and 58,604 in 2019, so I don’t think they expected it to tank to 50k in 2021. Still probably supply limited in 2021 but so was just about every car company.
Yes, the RAV4 is a benchmark to compare the Telluride to, but they ARE in both different cost brackets and categories. Pilot seems to be a better benchmark.
Another useful benchmark is that for 2021, Toyota global sales were almost 9.6M, Kia was almost 2.8M.
Honda Pilot is a Midsize Crossover SUV, like the Telluride, and had 2021 sales of 143K in the US. Honda global sales were 4.5M in 2021.
So the Telluride can still be a success for Kia, while selling a fraction of the units of the RAV4
My last 3 cars were Teslas.
Extremely happy with it. The lane centering is fantastic for high way driving.
You bought 3 Teslas back to back?! You must really love it. Why did you then move to the Telluride?
I thought Tesla lasts really long. So why 3?
I really doubt it's stagnation.
Still better than stupid commercials for marketing dollars.
Still a cool spot. Car ads in the 90s were so much better. “Enjoy the ride” was another good Nissan one.
I kind of think them building a deep product design bench to pull off their design revolution would also lead to these kinds of projects because those groups love this kinds of side projects.
You actually don't want many "car guys" in these design groups unless it's for a sports/enthusiast car, so some non-car product design people were likely hired, a good thing.
> Kia and Hyundai are putting out some of the more exciting products right now in the car industry
https://electrek.co/2021/12/28/hyundai-shuts-down-engine-dev...
I think a lot of carmakers are going to make this move. Given the time needed to develop those projects, I think really few carmakers are working on new ICEs right now.
> EU recently banned sales of ICE engines starting by 2030.
Note that Germany agreed on the plan recently : https://cleantechnica.com/2022/03/18/germany-gets-on-board-w... so, it's probably just a matter of time now given the influence of Germany over UE and their special situation in the automobile industry.
The Prius has been incremental for the last 20 years.
I'd argue that in the case of the Prius it means that they were a successful innovation.
And the original claim was 35 years, not 20 :)
That reliability survey is flawed, it includes issues that are fixed as a condition for delivery. Tesla owner satisfaction is one of the highest in the industry.
I go on about Yamaha as a company a bit, but when I saw this, I saw a future Yamaha level of design. Cars are just rolling smartphones now anyway, and even if this instrument becomes a loss leader, it may move Kia from a car company to a lifestyle brand.
The pink noise stuff is more interesting than the woo implied by it, since it's the basis for lofi beats, and ambient/minimalist music in general is arguably hitting a new crest probably not seen since the early 90s. I just paid an unreasonable amount of money for tickets to see Olafur Arnalds, and saw a symphony do a Philip Glass premire just the other week. The old musique concrete concept was full of pretentious silliness, but the core idea of 'music as an experience' seems to be blooming just now. If you listen to electronic music and DJs, a lot of it is ephemeral, and this Kia instrument for personal sound design seems like a tool for that same experiential music.
Their appeal to science on this one is neither here nor there for me, but I've done some reading on the topic to support my own music experients. These were the papers that I used to justify buying more VCOs for my modular rig, and they may be on to something:
meta analysis of effect of binaural beats on cognition, anxiety: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-018-1066-8
effect of binaural beats for asmr effects on sleep: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6900908/
Worst case, it's a spectacular flop, a bunch of them end up going for pennies on ebay, and a few years later some poor kids somewhere pick them up and use them the way they did the Roland 303.
I could be totally wrong, but some wording on that page makes me believe they are planning to release a hardware component to it. This one quote specifically:
"The Kia instrument features a touchpad keyboard [emphasis mine] so you can play as you go. You can create endless patterns, save your loops, play them back immediately and modulate the sounds with the dials. The key buttons light up when played, which offers a quick visual orientation."
I agree though, you are most likely right. Wouldn't be the first time a promo website decided to put a bunch of weird phrasing for whatever reason.
Even on that same kia page, they talk about 4 "neuroscientific" parameters for the synth. I was expecting some randomized (ala arturia microfreak) or neural-net related things. Turns out, they were referring to things like BPM.
This is really cruel to the very smart, creative people and quite a lot of spirited women who led that movement. Éliane Radigue's works alone are a monumental achievement in music. The entire power electronics and noise genres owe a huge debt to the pioneers of musique concrete. They were playing with new media and giving voice to the industry of cities. I don't see anything pretentious or silly there.
Cruelty to me is the cynicism of having open minded and generous audiences sit through self indulgent performance art and then telling them it's redemption for their anxiety about being provincial and unsophisticated. Always struck me as a mean trick. However, maybe it's my bias, as if modern power electornics and noise musicians owed me a debt, I would probably write it off.
Also, I just found Olafur Arnalds from his music cribs tour on Spitfire Audio [1]. It seems he has collaborated with them on some virtual instruments. There are several videos of him on their channel including breakdowns of some of his music. The last couple of weeks I've been down a YouTube rabbit hole on these modern composers (mostly for film and television).
It has 8 built-in samples that play continuously. It also has a knob to add filtered white noise, which also plays continuously. Then there's a monophonic subtractive synthesizer, which I was unable to get to make any particularly nice sound. If I hold down a key for a while and then press a different one the sound unexplicably stops.
This a pretty lame instrument, which is beaten-out in both features and quality by the stock instruments that your DAW came with. Even if that's the 2002 version of Fruity Loops.
My impression (not having read about the history of this thing) is that this was some Kia employee's side project that some genius executive was impressed by, in the same way that my mom is impressed when I put two windows side-by-side on her computer.
https://shop.porsche.com/us/en/steak-knife-p15-set-4-pieces-...
So, having some music app is odd, but I’m sure you can find 20 stranger ideas car companies have tried at some point to increase brand awareness.
Louis Vuitton has made coffee cups, dumbbells, pizza boxes, etc. Fashion houses and luxury brands are notorious for those sort of things more so than any car company.
https://shop.porsche.com/us/en/911-soundbar--limited-edition...
It looks weird and awkward the way they do it.
"Update 13 October 2021: This method is great for getting piano key proportions very near accurate with a few very simple steps. Thanks to Rob Brown who added more details in the comments that will be helpful to anyone looking to make a highly accurate model (e.g. if you’re trying to align a drawing with a photo)"
The actual proportions are described in the link above (I wrote a little algorithm to do it accurately for my music app)
Also, the infotainment system is constantly yelling at me about contact downloading from my phone and I have no idea how to turn that off.
Weird combination of hard to operate and way too proactive. I wonder what kind of team would produce this Frankenstein behavior.
The stuff that needs to work does work though, and the price worked for me.
The car is set to unlock the doors when I shift to Park, but if a passenger manually unlocks a door while I am still in Drive, it does not unlock the other doors when I do select Park. I need to shift to Park, back to Drive, and then back again to Park to let the rest of the passengers out.
If my phone's Bluetooth is connected to the car stereo, and I forget to turn off the head unit before turning off the ignition, then next time I start the car, the radio starts playing at maximum volume.
I'm renting a Fiat at the moment and it has this same bug. It's so infuriating that I stopped playing music in it entirely.
I don't feel like I would want the car to turn down my music for me.
Just...don't pull into your parking with the music blaring like a punk...?
I have my phone playing music over Bluetooth at a normal volume (pretty quiet, in fact), and then I leave my car, come back and start it and some random local radio station starts playing at an ear-splitting volume.
I might use this again just for the background sounds (rain, forest, etc.)
I thought it was well written.
I had to google this. Apparently, and they're very proud of this, it was 300 twigs before the found the _right_ one.
[1]: https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a31071094/volvo-xc40-recha...
> Unique chimes recorded by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra will provide musical alerts for drivers of the all-new Lincoln Aviator; the musicians recorded symphonic chimes for about 25 features in the Aviator
https://media.lincoln.com/content/lincolnmedia/lna/us/en/new...
To induce the flow state further, every composition should be arranged following these 4 neuroscientific parameters:
Harmonic variations are better remembered by the listener and activate certain areas of the brain.
A lot of electric vehicles sound like coil whine. Shrill high pitched whine. The new Amazon backup sound is, i think, chirps of pink noise; could be much worse I dont want arbitrary sound- because folks have no taste & would pick obnoxious garbage- but letting folks mix together some decent ambient sounds- that sounds acceptable, to fulfill mandatory minimum pedestrian notification requirements.
[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCoconutEffect
Had no idea that there needed to be modulation based on speed, but that totally makes sense, matches what I hear. Thanks for sharing!
Stop running cars in areas that are easily accessible to pedestrians. There are already plenty of streets pedestrians have to use an overpass or underpass for. It's even safer and doesn't ruin the auditory environment.
I agree with separating cars and pedestrians better, but the solution can't be to make life harder for the pedestrians. Cities I've visited where you have to use an overpass to cross every road are awful to walk around.
Why not?
Oh, one of my tiniest pet peeves. The last time the OS was called "Mac OS X" was ten years ago, and even that was spelled differently.
Dial in your distant thunder and rain on roof with the mixer controls. Free on web, and there's native apps. Interesting technical details about the recording and microphones too if you explore the website.
There’s a total of 8 samples, they’re all just nature samples - it’s a basic subtractive synth, it did work ‘out of the box’ in Logic; that’s kinda my whole review. It’s nothing I could see using for anything, unfortunately - though it is small, so I don’t see myself removing it.
And am I the only one who thinks the website makes it look like a hardware synth? It took me a while to even get it was a VST.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schreyer
I'm OK with a car company doing things that are not aimed expressly at making cars. I happen to like what they've done with the last ten years of cars leading up to:
despite the fact that I prefer biking, motorcycling, or trains. My dog doesn't fit into those other modes very well.
The research on the asserted brain effects of the songs seems unlikely to be too rigorous.
I guess the point of the product is to have an accessory in the car for average consumers to easily play around with.
But really I'd rather just make the sound go away entirely.
* Drag coefficients are significantly lower in EVs, partially because you smooth out the undercarriage and generally get more freedom in aerodynamic design.
* Due to range concerns, EV tires tend to be more focused on low rolling resistance.
Both of these should gently reduce road noise, if I were to speculate?
As you say, only modded and older cars make enough sound cruising at 25mph to hear over the tire noise.
Edit: too bad it's not polyphonic.
Oversight? Or will they sue anyone who starts making good money using this software and loops?
Logic Pro: https://i.imgur.com/A7el6vh.png
And Kia: https://i.imgur.com/bEhz7S2.jpg
It's called marketing and this is an attempt to make Kia look like they care about "the nature". It's obviously trying to appeal to a younger demographic that does no longer care about cars and are worried about the future of our planet.
Kia has done some nice things, I like the styling on their minivan.
Exactly.
> though that may not be the target demographic.
I'm thinking this is exactly one of their target demographics for a campaign like this. Aware, forward-thinking and often young to mid-life consumers. To Kia, every car buyer is a good car buyer. To the planet, it's quite the opposite.
Showing you're doing fun/exciting things with software is a good move in the competition for scarce sweng talent.
The best first car is no car or a used car.
Creating a new car produces massive amounts of carbon pollution.
For a mid-sized average sedan the pollution created from finding and smelting ore to the massive amounts of energy and water required during production it takes around 45/50k miles just to offset production alone, and that's assuming the new car does not use any energy.
Add to this that producing batteries is even much more taxing on the planet both in terms of resources and toxicity.
Add to this yet another thing: unless the energy that's produced wherever you recharge your car isn't coming from renewables the gains in pollution are further limited.
So, to conclude: unless you commute a lot, plan to keep your car for a long time and you live in an area where there is a huge % of renewables the, by far greenest solution is to buy a used car or keep your one, even if it has an old polluting engine, it's gonna pollute much less than producing a new car and using gas and coal to power it
According to EPA the average car during its lifecycle produces 38 metric tons of CO2 if it reaches 200k miles.
Producing a car alone, producing it, without putting a single mile in it produces between 7 and 35 metric tons (based on the size of the vehicle).
If you can do very basic math you can understand that the greener option is ALWAYS to keep your old car, unless, again, you do really a lot of miles and electricity in your country is mostly (70%+) renewable.
But that truth is hardly said loud, because it doesn't sell lots of cars and doesn't make enough money.
Meanwhile we're killing the planet even further convincing places like southern europe to buy electric cars even tho they mostly use gas to produce electricity in the first place.
There's plenty of studies online you can read: https://bfy.tw/SyoX
Your point of purchasing a "used car" as a better option reduces carbon emissions by removing vehicles from the system.
Don't buy new cars as a Co2 mitigation strategy is unrealistic and against buying electric is just pedantic and your argument is frankly misleading.
If you want to cite the EPA: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths
OTOH when is the last time you've ever seen an ad for a Trek or a Schwinn? This is the time when bike marketers can come and eat everyones lunch with simple facts and logic. Much better to only need 15 pounds of metal and your own power to move around than 4000lbs of metal and power from a natural gas plant to move yourself around. Hopefully we see more ads for bikes in the coming decades.
I've heard recently that instead of getting electric motorcycles, the market is much more focused on e-bikes because there is less regulation around them.
Me: I would like to buy a piano
Yamaha: Here you go
Me: Hmm, but I'd also like to buy a motorcycle... Do you know perhaps where I can find a good one?
Yamaha: You're not gonna believe this...
Samsung: here you go
I'd also like to buy a 155mm self propelled howitzer
Samsung: you're not going to believe this...
Yamaha: Here. You don't need any contract to download latest firmware/manual.
Maybe it sucks. Maybe it's great. Whatever the case, it's cool that they're trying something weird.
[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2020/01/16/the-hyphenate-makes-a-b...
Just.. just stick to making cheap cars? This is the kind of thing that makes cars not cheap: things that have nothing to do with cars. Why are there people being paid to do this? Just make cheap cars.