Every Porsche will soon be able to make its own custom soundtrack

Forget electric cars and autonomous driving, adaptive custom music soundtracks to our driving style is the future of driving we’ve all secretly wanted. Porsche have sent their boffins in to create a way to connect movement and music called Soundtrack My Life. So how does it work? Porsche explains:

“A Porsche Macan is waiting at a set of Los Angeles traffic lights, the Walt Disney Concert Hall looming large ahead. This is fitting and at the same time contradictory. While the famous concert hall always plays music according to a system of notes, we experience something completely new in the Macan.

"The traffic lights turn green, and the spherical sounds that were just heard in the SUV come to life – not because the driver has started a piece of music but because the Macan is generating this music through its movement. After a left turn, the road is clear and the Porsche starts rolling. Now it sounds as if the imperial troops are on the march in a science fiction film, until the SUV brakes at the next traffic lights and the music, too, falls back into a soft carpet of sound with a final drumbeat. Welcome to Soundtrack My Life…”

The new audio technology isn’t about playing a personalised playlist or changing the music’s tempo and pitch to match the car’s speed says Norman Friedenberger, the person responsible for Soundtrack My Life. “It's about creating an individual sound experience from a construction kit with a variety of sounds and musical structures during a drive. This is created by the driver and their journey in real-time. This will then sound different for everyone – as unique as the journey itself."

Adaptive sound is the technical term for this new audio creation and gives drivers and passengers an alternative to listening to the radio or streaming their own music. The driver first selects a basic musical mood that has a soundtrack composed specifically for a particular driving situation. The software accesses pre-composed musical elements and, depending on the acceleration, speed and forces in the car, changes the complexity of the mix of these individual elements, adding or removing tracks and sounds to rearrange everything again and again. Your morning rush hour commute will never sound the same again.

Friedenberger has spent around two years working on Soundtrack My Life and it is important to him that the car does not combine the same sounds at every location, but instead varies what comes out of the speakers each time – just as the daily drive to the office is never exactly the same. As the technology evolves, Soundtrack My Life could one day also detect the driver's mood and tailor the music to it.

A prototype of Soundtrack My Life currently exists as a smartphone app. It has not yet been decided whether this will remain the case or whether the series-production version of the app will also be part of Porsche’s infotainment system offering ongoing.

Related: Spotify launches Car Thing, a smart player for your car

Related: Why Eurovision and the auto industry have more in common than you think

Related: New survey shows radio still the most popular in-car audio choice for Aussies