Bose sees beyond music for sound management

When it comes to the experience of sound, conflicting trends will be converging in cockpits in coming years as electric vehicles and advanced safety technologies become more prominent.

First there is the new silence of electric drives, which makes in-cabin conversations, entertainment and even vehicle signals more audible. Then there's a challenging new desire to isolate individual sound spaces so that one passenger can listen to a podcast while another listens to music. And then there's a third trend: the rise of new safety signals that will alert drivers to road hazards ahead, urgent traffic situations, driving directions and incoming messages.

Sorting out these trends and distilling them into new vehicle cabin technologies is the province of Bose Corp., the nearly 60-year-old purveyor of audio products from Framingham, Mass. John Pelliccio, 49, head of product communications for Bose Automotive, spoke with Senior Editor Lindsay Chappell about what's coming to future cockpits. Here are edited excerpts.

Q: Bose is talking to automakers about a technology it calls "ultra near-field speakers." What's the idea behind that?

A: It's not just a speaker anymore. It's what we're calling an experience-driven approach to what consumers see and hear and feel inside the cabin. Great music is important, but it's not enough. We need to render all kinds of sounds — non-entertainment sounds, phone calls, ADAS warnings, all that stuff together with great sounding music.

Bose engineers have been working on new concepts in embedded speakers for a while now, right? But this is a new function you're describing.

It's an evolution of something we've been working on for more than a decade. And I think you'll see a lot more of it in the years ahead.

How does it work?

Since the pandemic, there are very few boundaries between work time and personal time. We've come to realize that there's tremendous value in letting people listen to different things, or listen to the same thing at different levels, depending on where they're sitting in the car.

So if I'm talking to you on a Zoom call in my car, your voice is coming to the entire cabin and everybody in the car is stuck listening to you. That's a source of friction. Another source of friction is passengers who don't agree on what volume to listen to the same music at.

So we have a technology called seat-centric volume control that actually allows you to listen to the same content, but at significantly different volumes between the front passenger seat and the driver's seat.

The driver sets the volume at a master level, and the passenger has a separate knob they can use to turn the volume up or down relative to where the driver is listening to it. It's almost like dual-zone climate control, but for sound.

How will you do that?

The ultra near-field speakers are mounted in the seat tops, coupled with some active cancellation technology. The phone call is routed only to the driver seat, and it's significantly muted everywhere else. You can press a button and transfer the call to the passenger seat if you want.

But is Bose incorporating safety sounds on top of this?

Yes. If the speakers are mounted close enough to your ears, you can control all the sounds hitting your left ear independently from the sounds hitting your right ear, and that allows you to do some amazing things.

Right now, they are music-based systems. But you can start spatially rendering sounds from all around you.

So for example, when you're merging onto a highway and there's a car in your blind spot, right now your rearview mirror will blink orange. A beep will come at you from the [instrument panel] somewhere. But where do you really want that beep to come from? You want it to come from the place where you need to look. These ultra near-field speakers can actually make that warning sound appear to come from just over my left shoulder, which is the right place to look to make sure I'm not going to have a collision.

And simple things like parking sensors or tire pressure warnings — wouldn't it be great to have the warning come from the corner that's actually low?

So we envision a tremendous opportunity when it comes to spatial rendering of sounds that are not music.

Are these advancements still on the drawing board at Bose, or are they in the pipeline to customers?

They're in the pipeline, and we're actively talking to all of our customers about it.