Lexus and Its Unusual Ideas

Cars as musical instruments?

Car curiosities.

Music stimulates emotions, affects pulse and blood pressure, improves alertness. Carmakers devote much attention to sounds cars make, and at Lexus even door seals or electric tailgates are developed acoustically. All these sounds landed in tracks composed for mindfulness training, a meditation kind reducing stress, anxiety and improving wellbeing.

Mindfulness training helps us become more aware of our reactions and judgments, helping separate stimuli from responses to decide how to answer them. Lexus mindfulness tracks, through wide ranges of interesting melodies and sound effects, let us observe our initial reactions to these intriguing sounds and tendencies to attribute their origins to specific objects and actions.

Lexus's British branch shared music on a Spotify playlist, with 4 tracks composed using sounds like electric window and seat motors, electric tailgate closing warnings, sunshade folding on headliners or seatbelt buckling. Car instruments also vary by track. In Lexus Uplifting Idle Engine musicians used for example an idling combustion engine, Lexus RX L engine starts or Lexus LC interior switches, while Lexus Rhytmic Warmth from Screen Spray used windscreen washer and wiper sounds. Recorded sounds were carefully processed and mixed, and artists working on finished tracks extracted as much as possible. The result is 4 tracks prepared, among others, for mindfulness training.

Reading about it first may seem complicated, but mindfulness is briefly a relaxing journey inward, building conscious body-mind bonds. Tracks by Lexus's British branch will not put us into trances or act like hypnosis. They are tools for beginners to start conscious listening adventures and discover meditation benefits, through which many people simply feel better.

Playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/album/7G8PuUHE71hnjFOITo9iBf?si=VVPa_XQFRM-YzQ_h0dbFaA