Adaptive Infotainment Plays Tunes To Match Your Dangerous Driving

Part of the fun of watching action movies is imagining yourself as the main character, always going on exciting adventures and, of course, being accompanied by the perfect soundtrack to score the excitement and drama of your life. While having an orchestra follow you around might not always be practical, [P1kachu] at least figured out how to get some musical orchestration to sync up with how he drives his car, Fast-and-Furious style.

The idea is pretty straightforward: when [P1kachu] drives his car calmly and slowly, the music that the infotainment system plays is cool and reserved. But when he drops the hammer, the music changes to something more aggressive and in line with the new driving style. While first iterations of his project used the CAN bus, he moved to Japan and bought an old Subaru that doesn’t have CAN. The new project works on something similar called Subaru Select Monitor v1 (SSM1), but still gets the job done pretty well.

The hardware uses an Asus Tinkerboard and a Raspberry Pi with the 7″ screen, and a shield that can interface with CAN (and later with SSM1). The new music is selected by sensing pedal position, allowing him to more easily trigger the aggressive mode that his previous iterations did. Those were done using vehicle speed as a trigger, which proved to be ineffective at producing the desired results. Of course, there are many other things that you can do with CAN bus besides switching up the music in your car.

23 thoughts on “Adaptive Infotainment Plays Tunes To Match Your Dangerous Driving

  1. Every time you drive around and the cops suddenly decide to chase you, you never have the time to change the radio to the perfect tune. But now there finally is a sollution to this well known problem. Nothing improves your driving skills then some screaming music loudly in the background. I wonder though… if you fly out of the bend and hit that tree (and the airbag fails to deploy), does the music change into a deathmarch tune.

    Although I like the idea of this project, I guess we all know that it is a good thing it doesn’t exist yet. But it would perhaps be a nice idea to invert the choice of music. So that when driving like a madman, the music goes into a very relaxing tune, in order to calm down the driver and in order to maintain a safe level of driving. I saw an experiment in a car related TV show a very long time ago, it did seem to help a bit. Sadly, I can’t remember which show it was though.

  2. This exact idea has been at the back of my mind for years. What would really be awesome is hooking this into a dynamic music engine from a game. That would allow for very smooth and fast transitions from calm to nuts and vice versa. Something like far cry or mirror’s edge.

  3. Just EXACTLY what the world needs – a positive feedback device for aggressive drivers. I suppose I don’t mind if they kill themselves (to theme music!), I’d just rather that they didn’t take any of the rest of us with them. I-81, I’m talking to YOU!

    1. The feedback can easily be inverted. This concept has a lot of potential for reliving driver stress and reducing road accidents.

      This project is an excellent proof of concept and well executed irrespective of the feedback polarity.

      1. So you get in the car and loud heavy death metal plays when you are backing out of your parking space at 3 kph and the only way to turn it into quiet, relaxing music is to drive at twice the speed limit?

        Not sure a straightforward binary system is quite what you might generally want here.

    2. Huh? Did you say something? For some reason I spontaneously fell asleep while reading this comment.

      You could always configure it to play bananaphone whenever you go over 45 to assuage you fears

  4. Those harsh cuts between unrelated songs won’t be very pleasant over time, what you need is something like the old lucasarts iMUSE system where the music adapts subtly and glide seamlessly between themes! MIDI is the future!

    Also I think it would make more sense to wire it up to the gear selector than the gas pedal, switching tracks as you downshift on a manual or switch to sport mode on an automatic.

      1. Wait for the police to get their hands on the data. They won’t bother to pull you over. They’ll just take the fine from your account or in my case, you can’t take what the government already took, so they’ll send the bailiffs round.

        1. That’s why you don’t log it and destroy the data.
          As for some government instituted back door that rats you out to the police that would get hacked all the time and get people killed.

  5. Wow so much slinging in this thread. Keep in mind that there’s a big difference between driving recklessly and taking a nice spin somewhere safe away from traffic and well within your personal skill limits and the car’s performance limits. If a driver can’t distinguish the two, they should address their needs in a safer way and not take the risk on behalf of others. Autocross is cheap and a great way to do this.

  6. I would go further and add route and it’s expected slow-downs by way of GPS. A little down tempo as you approach that next little friendly town on that state highway that’s not an interstate. Easy in the hood.

  7. I’d like to put something like this in my Trans Am or Corvette but I’m afraid it might encourage me to drive fast more than I already do.
    Also saw Mugi in his infotainment lol.

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