A roar deal: why your car’s engine noise might be fake

From smartphone-camera 'clicks' to websites that emulate the sound of a turning page, you shouldn't believe everything you hear

There's a "fantastic cackle" from the Jaguar F-Type's V8 engine, while the new Ford Mustang makes a beautiful "wub-wub", according to motoring broadcaster Quentin Willson. Increasingly, however, the throb of a high-performance engine is faked or artificially boosted and then piped into a car's cockpit. A new invention developed by Ford for "generating engine noise" has been lodged with the US Patent and Trademark Office, demonstrating that artificial sounds are now a big global business.

We live in a world of ersatz noise, where computers mimic sounds once made by machinery, from the old-fashioned shutter-style click of the camera on phones to websites that shuffle like paper when we turn a page.