Can we have more noise please?
DESIGNERS’ habit of “fixing” the acoustics of products, from satisfyingly chunky clunks of closing doors to synthetic “combustion engine” noises for electric cars (30 July), reminded Ken Green that it is not new to have problems when authenticity goes wrong.
He recalls a director of BBC radio drama in the 1940s issuing a decree banning artificial sound effects. Faithfully complying, a producer dispatched an outside-broadcast crew to a railway station to obtain the sound of a character’s train arriving.
The returning crew was met with consternation: what they had managed to record was the…
