On the way to class yesterday morning, I found myself walking behind two people who were quietly chatting.
The unusual bit: both were wearing headphones and playing music so loud that I could hear it a few paces behind them.
Slow as I am on the uptake on these sorts of things, I almost wondered out loud how they were listening both to their tunes and each other.
It took me a solid 30 seconds before I realized what was going on.
Each had positioned their over-ear headphones in a sort of half-cocked position, leaving one ear to the open air to hear their buddy, and allowing the other half of the bulky pad to lie firmly clamped on the ear they weren’t using.
I couldn’t help but think of two agoraphobic, house-ridden neighbors, peeking anxiously outside of their front doors, desperately trying to shout pleasantries to each other, all without daring to step onto the front porch.
The very old and overdone point I’m trying to make here is that audio entertainment has become less about pleasing the listener than protecting them from the outside world.
Say you’re walking through the crowds that bustle outside of Russell House in the early afternoon. You’re not late for class, or anything like that. You’re just strolling through the crowd with some vague destination in mind.
With your headphones off, you can hear the universal sounds that human beings make when they pass each other in large numbers: the unvarying noise of hundreds of rubber-soled feet making contact with asphalt, the hyper-enthused smiles of Greek-life pamphleteers, the one-sided cell-phone chatterings, and, if you’re lucky, the wacko fundamentalist Bible types with badly photoshopped signs with hellfire on them. (A side note: nothing cheers me up quite like being told what I have to do to avoid everlasting punishment. At least someone feels certain about what’s going on.)
With unfettered hearing, you are never unaware of the fact that there are people outside of yourself. That within every passerby there exists an entirely different psychological world that is as distant from your thinking as the farthest stars are from Earth.
With headphones on, it’s all about you. You are able to choose the soundtrack to which you operate. Like an actor in a film, you can completely wall off one of your very few senses to the harsh realities that other people bring to the table. Walking through the crowd with headphones now becomes more like an exercise in alienation. None of those people can hear what you hear.
The totemic headphones reassure: You are unique. You are special. You are set apart.
Absence of sound also plays its unique role. By making everyone else silent, you, intentionally or not, make your inner monologue the only voice you can hear. (If you, like me, wonder why you feel alone in large crowds, this could be a possible explanation.)
Don’t forget, being able to speak (or, more precisely, be heard) is where real power lies.
Ever since ancient times when oral cultures dominated the world, to speak is to command attention. It is an affirmation of your own existence when others prick their ears up at your words. Having your speech ignored is the most withering feeling imaginable.
When you wear headphones, you make everyone else into figurants (those actors who mouth words but remain silent, letting the main characters go through their lines). Everyone else becomes a side-character, not worth hearing from the outset.
Any hope of empathizing with others is drowned out in a roar of noise.