Ever since I was a kid, one of the things I can always remember loving about cool cars and motorbikes was the sound they made. The thrill of standing at the traffic lights watching some kind of expensive car with a really throaty roar at idle, and the anticipation of the bark and rumble it would make as it took off down the street. There’s something so raw and intoxicating about it.
To this day I still get incredibly excited by the same thing. I find youtube to be a great way to spend a few minutes each day just watching and listening to people’s recordings of their high performance cars. Accelerating away from a standing start or on-board footage as the car accelerates towards the horizon and then slows for a bend.
One of my current favourites is this:
It’s pretty long but very cool and the sound combined with the view forward is just excellent. The down shifts of the gears and the blipping of the throttle sound awesome.
The sound, both the volume and the tone, is so exactly linked with the sense of speed and the progress of the vehicle that if you were to remove it the experience becomes very dull indeed.
It’s exactly the same on a bicycle. The way you can tell you’re cycling faster is the feeling of the wind against your face and hands. You can hear the wind rushing past your ears as you speed up and then it changes as you slow for obstacles.
If you’re anything like me when I was young, you’ll also make your own engine sounds as you cycle around. In fact, I used to make engine sounds even when I was running around, or walking, or sitting. Now that I think about it I must have been pretty annoying. It can be great fun though, trying to emulate or re-create all sorts of different engine sounds like screaming Formula 1 cars, or the popping sound made by rally cars.
The idea with Turbospoke is to bring this extra sensory excitement to the joy of cycling. You won’t believe how engaging and how much fun it is until you try it. If you already cycle around making engine sounds then I know you’ll absolutely love it!!
Here’s another sound clip I really like. These kids obviously love the sound of their Dad’s car. I particularly like the bikes discarded in the background, you just know that they cycled off making engine sounds!!
