This story appeared in the September/October 2020 of Discover magazine as "Sound Off." We hope you’ll subscribe to Discover and help support science journalism at a time when it’s needed the most.
Six years ago, three Volvo engineers sat on a forest floor in western Sweden, picking twigs off the ground and snapping them in half.
“We were in the woods for two days sampling sounds,” recalls Fredrik Hagman, a sound designer at the company. Three hundred sticks later, they returned to the automaker’s headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden.
