Rashaan Josey
FOR ENSURING THAT YOUR NEXT CAR PURRS
WHAT DOES YOUR CAR SOUND like? What should it sound like?
These are the questions Rashaan Josey is working to answer. His division at audio giant Bose is developing new ways to achieve the ideal “in-cabin” sound environment in the age of EVS. Along with emissions, EVS reduce engine noise, which creates new markets for Bose features such as stereo surround-sound enhancement and noise-canceling technologies. “When you remove the engine,” says Josey, who trained as an electrical and software engineer, “it’s amazing [to discover] how much sound it covered— noise from the tires, the road, HVAC, a rattle that was there that you never knew existed.”
Bose has created multispeaker sound systems for the Chevrolet Volt EV, the Hyundai Elantra, the Porsche Taycan EV, and the Volvo EX90. Josey’s team also worked with GMC to develop a sound system in the 2022 Hummer EV. Its speakers emit electric propulsion sounds to mask unwanted noise but enhance good sound, whether it is your kids’ conversation in the back seat, the dulcet musings of your favorite podcaster, or important signals for the driver such as the beepbeep-beep of a nearby truck in reverse. “One of our core pillars is, ‘Hear only what you want,’ ” Josey says.
Now, a European carmaker is integrating Bose’s tech into a future EV model from the start, allowing engineers to consider removing materials, such as padding meant to muffle incabin noise. This reduction of matter leads to a lighter vehicle that uses less energy per mile, extending charging range. And as more cars become computerized, the next frontier is likely to be experiential aural branding. Think of the classic Intel Inside sound logo, but for your ride. “There’s value in Porsche being able to create a sound that’s unique to them,” says Josey, who sees Bose “working with carmakers to create those signature sounds.”
IIN 1807, WHEN
he was almost
40, Muslim scholar Omar Ibn Said was captured in what is now Senegal. Sent to South Carolina, he was enslaved into his nineties, leaving behind a spare autobiography in Arabic and several Islamic theological papers.
Now, his story is being sung in
Omar, the first opera based on the memoir of an enslaved person. Commissioned by the Spoleto Festival USA and first staged in Charleston, South Carolina, last spring, Omar is also the first opera by Rhiannon Giddens, who has spent decades teasing out the strains of different cultures—african, Indigenous, Irish—in American roots and folk music, as a founding member of the string band Carolina Chocolate Drops and the allfemale banjo quartet Our Native Daughters. She wrote the libretto for Omar and co-composed it with Michael Abels (who scored Get Out and Us); it has also been staged in Los Angeles and Boston and won 2023’s Pulitzer Prize for Music.
“My mission is to complicate who gets to be representative of the American story,” says Giddens. Roughly 30% of enslaved people in North America were Muslims, she notes; Said was the only one who left a memoir. Giddens says her challenge was to extract a man from a book that largely relies on Quran and Bible passages.
“I’m never going to be close to the real Omar, because he left so little of himself in his autobiography. But he left a lot about his spiritual identity, so that’s what I focused on.”
Omar is part of a steadily growing number of operas by Black composers speaking to an African American experience. (Will Liverman and DJ King Rico’s The
Factotum, a barbershop take on The Barber of Seville, opened at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in February.) “I thought about what I would want to see as a Black, 18-yearold opera singer going into school,” Giddens says. “I wanted to add to the canon of works that are culturally specific to them.”