The person who invented headphones deserves a Nobel prize. The person who invented the speaker (with the exception of use in a dance class, obviously) deserves to be hung, drawn, quartered, tarred, feathered, run through, put in front of a firing squad, given concrete shoes and an inadequate swimming lesson, and any other sufficiently ridiculous old-school torture method that I can use as a literary device to explain my distaste, but in such a hyperbolic way that people know I’m not actually suggesting physical harm comes to another human.
I’m finding myself in more and more public spaces (both here in Nepal, and I had already noticed this happening in the UK as well) where there are competing soundtracks. Perhaps the restaurant is piping ambient music and three groups of people are showing each other social media videos with the sound on. Or someone is listening to music on a speaker they have strapped to their bag. Or someone is watching a TV show or something on their phone on a bus with no headphones. Or someone is having a video or voice call with someone who they have on speaker.
And I am increasingly more and more irritated by this. Which is interesting. Because a group of people talking at a table may be louder and more intrusive than someone watching a video on their phone. And yet I find the video to be orders of magnitude more annoying. I also find myself getting annoyed with people who listen to music on their speakers – even if I really enjoy the music that they are playing. It is the act of the intrusion rather than the content of the intrusion that seems to rankle.
Or perhaps it’s just age and that as I rapidly approach 50 (which I am super excited to be doing, by the way) I’m becoming more of a killjoy.
The very existence of noise cancelling headphones seems to tacitly acknowledge this problem, and there is clearly a market for something that cuts out the ambient noise. Mostly I want the ambient noise, I just don’t want it to be too loud. And I don’t want the audio overstimulation of two or three different music sources (especially when they then start to turn the volume up in order to drown out the others).
I wonder if this is one of those social cycles that will oscillate. Phones got bigger and then smaller and then bigger again. Skirts have been getting longer and shorter. Trousers have been getting skinnier and baggier. Music went from boomboxes to walkmen to ipods to Bluetooth speakers. So maybe we’re at one end of a pendulum swing that will naturally head back the other way soon.
In the meantime, I bet everyone in this café would really appreciate some Hadley Fraser, he has a new album out you know (Things that Come and Go) and it is breathtakingly stunning, and his previous albums (Lights Around the Shore and Just Let Go) are fantastic. I’m sure they’d love him if only I played him loud enough! Now, where did I put my speaker?
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