Tech
This ingenious engineer turned a Polestar EV into music-making robots
Just the kind of refreshing PR move we can really get behind.
Swedish company Polestar is a mighty impressive Tesla competitor, giving parent company Volvo a beefy leg up in the race to be the next big electric vehicle company. Now, thanks to some very creative engineering, Polestar can add another impressive skill to its resume: the ability to make music.
Polestar has teamed up with robotics engineer Moritz Simon Geist to make a series of one-of-a-kind music-making robots. Geist first took disparate parts from the Polestar 2 and turned them into an array of odd-looking robots; he then programmed each to extract a sound sample from the elements inside itself. Kind of like how humans look into the deepest parts of their souls to find inspiration for their own art. Or something like that.
Unique sound waves — These robots are no small feat of engineering. It would be difficult enough to extract samples from a regular old gas-guzzler — as Polestar explains, its cars are “engineered to keep vibrations to an absolute minimum.” So Geist’s robots couldn’t just pick up the kind of audio cues you’d usually expect from a car’s internals; he had to build them to extract “unique sound waves” from the car’s electrical components.
Each of the five robots can be explored on the company’s website with a brief demo and explanation about where in the Polestar 2 it came from.
Now it’s your turn — Geist used his robots to create original beats, and then he took those beats and turned them into an original composition called “Sound of Soul.” You can stream the whole thing on SoundCloud.
Geist’s samples are also available for quick playback right on the Polestar website. The tap-to-play feature turns the six loops into a sort of EV drum machine. And Polestar wants those samples to be more than just some quick fun — it’s made them available for download for producers to play around with in actual tracks, too.
Aiming for different — Polestar does not want to be Tesla; it does not want to be Toyota or Volvo, either. Instead, the company is aiming for a complete departure from traditional vehicle marketing and aesthetics — hence the high-budget music-making campaign.
What we’ve seen thus far from the company’s offerings has proven Polestar to indeed be ultra-modern and outside-the-box. Something like a music-making robot is just fun and refreshing in comparison to Tesla’s ludicrous shenanigans.
