MR SOUND Ralf Heinrichs and his team create the sounds of Ford, from the engine to the glove compartment. How does that happen? And what inspired him to create the Ford Vignale sound?
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he sound of your engine. The sounds when you slam and lock your car door. Even the sound of opening and closing the glove compartment. In a Ford, these sounds are often not natural but created, and many of these sounds are created by Ralf Heinrichs and his team at the Ford design centre in Cologne, Germany. Is there a typical Ford Vignale sound? Oh, yes. It was also created by Ralf and his team – in an almost obsessive way. This isn’t surprising, sounds and the technique of creating them has been an obsession for Ralf since he was young. When he was 11, he started to build his own loudspeakers. Later as a university student in Bochum he came across the field of technical acoustics. He specialised in it, almost convinced that he would never get a job in this field.
The engine. The door slam. Other elements. A few years later, in 2000, Ford started looking for a so-called brand DNA, the sound became part of that and I led the acoustic side of it. The big question: how should a Ford sound? How should a Ford sound when you drive slowly, or fast, when you drive a normal Ford or a sports car, when you drive diesel or petrol…’ The team didn’t work alone. They invited customers – lots of customers – to a specially built studio and showcased the created sounds. Which sound do you prefer? Perhaps more important: which sound for you is a Ford sound? Or better still: a Ford Focus sound, a Ford Mondeo sound, a Ford Mustang sound?
A sound move
There were other sources of inspiration too. As a child Ralf had seen the movie Mad Max. Well, actually ‘heard’ is a better word. The movie stars not only Mel Gibson but also a Ford – the Ford Falcon Interceptor with a V8 engine. ‘I was really blown away by the sound of this car! A powerful sound, but also a real complex sound structure.’ The sounds stayed in his mind, his head, his ears – and inspired him when developing the sounds for the Ford ST.
He was wrong. In the mid-1990s Ford moved sound technology higher up the agenda. A friend of Ralf’s worked at Ford in Cologne and said to him: ‘Wouldn’t that be something for you?’ Before the mid-1990s in the automotive industry sound was nothing more than trying to avoid negative noises, to make engines quieter. That changed. Ralf recalls ‘We started to create sounds.
Hearing is believing
‘Our aim with this sound was to kind of reflect the luxuries of Ford Vignale’ 30
Ford Vignale
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