MaskFone
is the brand with which an invention that promises to be transformative has been marketed: a smart face mask that allows you to receive calls and listen to music or podcasts without taking it off, that is, a mask with built-in headphones.
It also has a microphone that offers crystal clear audio for telephone conversations and buttons through which you do not have to touch the phone to hang up, increase the volume of
podcasts
or change songs.
Contactless technologies taken to their maximum expression and, why not say it, minimum functionality.
Neuralink
,
Elon Musk's company that develops brain-machine interfaces, is already working on one that will allow users to stream music directly to their brain through chips that will be inserted directly into their heads
.
Musk commented that they are looking at ways to avoid blood vessels in the implantation of the chips, since they aspire to ensure that the brain does not swell when receiving a foreign body, a mini-machine.
New AirPod Max (Apple).
This week Apple has launched the AirPod Max,
the new over-ear wireless headphones with noise cancellation and a chip inserted into each end of the earbud.
It is H1, a chip that contains 10 audio cores and has a capacity for 9,000 million operations per second.
This is what is known as "computational audio", that is, listening to music or
podcasts
as if they were happening around you, in the same room.
In addition, the computational audio will allow the AirPod Max to analyze what we hear and adjust frequencies depending on how the pads are placed.
The "spatial audio" that these AirPod Max incorporate will allow a sound environment that goes beyond the left and right tracks, creating a "sound field" and promoting an absolutely immersive experience that will have as great beneficiaries, of course, the
podcasts
.
The AirPod Max have gone on sale for 629 euros and there is already a waiting list to get them.
These three technological artifacts - beautiful, strange, scientific - that I have just described will further sophisticated the listening experience, while also turning us into something like
sonic robots.
The question becomes obvious: if we take headphones as a mechanical extension of our body and cancel noise — but also all the sounds of life — what are we going to hear?
Are we not living in sound bubbles?
Will we not live confined in headphones?
The generation that listens with headphones
The BBC explained in its famous decalogue of the summer of 2018 in which it tried to distinguish between
podcast
and radio that, "
podcasts
are built for the generation that uses headphones."
And then he would add: "Be respectful, warm and kind inside their heads."
That same decalogue affirmed that
podcasts
are visually powerful forms —like great literature, on the other hand—;
the
podcasts
"may be cinema for the ears".
There is no doubt that the way of consuming audio affects the way of writing, narrating, and designing sound.
There is no way that collective listening to more traditional radio is anything like individual listening to
podcasts
today, except for conversational podcasts.
But could a
podcast
like
Guerra 3
or
De
que es no tal no be savored in the same way if it were not heard through headphones?
I have ever recognized —not without a certain irony— that there is an irrefutable test to know if a sound design works: if you perceive all the nuances listening to that episode on the headphones that are given away on trains and buses, we are in front of a good job.
Ramón Andrés, author of an extraordinary book called
Philosophy and Consolation of Music
(Cliff)
explains
that the most immediate consequence of going around the world with headphones on is artificiality, disorientation: “If we don't listen to what happens around us we can never have a keen sense of reality.
And in reality there is the neighbor.
Chronic isolation, in this case auditory, has produced and produces tyrannical minds.
It is difficult to have empathy if you do not listen to the word of the other, of the other.
And as for noise, isolating ourselves with music can be understood as legitimate self-defense, but we must know how to remove the headphones in time so as not to end up being a worse noise ourselves, which is that of selfishness ”.
His wise words remind us of the title of one of the classic works of the sonic universe:
The soundscape and the tuning of the world
, by Murray Schaffer.
In this book the author affirms that there is no silence for the living: “We do not have eyelids in our ears.
We are condemned to hear ”.
What if headphones were that loud, cyborg eyelid?
The path from buying the new AirPod Max to the Nauralink chip implantation is shorter than we think.
It is about the "augmented humanity" of which Éric Sadin speaks in his book of the same title published in Caja Negra Editores:
"If the transplantation of artificial prostheses corresponds to a movement that began at least half a century ago according to procedures that do not stop to be sophisticated, in no way represents the emblematic climax of the current intersection between humanity and technique ”.
In other words, the increasing miniaturization of electronic objects and chips relentlessly favors the continued expansion of the digital economy, also in the age of audification.
Sonic aesthetics
The aesthetics of
streamers
, rap or
trap
singers
, of
youtubers
and
podcasters
always seem to swing around whoever has them bigger.
The headphones, naturally.
There seems to be a secret competition between wearing the biggest headphones - we also see them in footballers getting off the bus on their way to the stadium - as a symbol of luxury but also of a certain autonomy, of a certain strength.
The latest music video by singer Nathy Peluso y Bizarrap abounds in this idea: the earphone as an ornament, on the same level as gold necklaces and expensive clothes.
Charlie Harding, one of the co-authors of
the Switched On Pop podcast,
has stated on several occasions that
listening to music through headphones is different from listening to speakers, since there is a spatial and temporal difference between you and the music
.
In the case of
podcasts
, Harding believed that wearing headphones had helped create a sense of closeness between the narrator and the listener.
Without a doubt, the musical production but also that of the
podcast
depend on the technological context.
Harding himself claimed that it was no coincidence that singers like Billie Eilish or Selena Gomez whispered instead of singing.
That kind of voice in a musical theme would have been impossible to fully perceive if the music had come from a transistor or a record player.
The noise of the world
We live in a world full of noise.
Only the pandemic imposed a certain silence.
In the city of Madrid, 33 sound level meters were placed in different neighborhoods.
The conclusion was astonishing: the sound pressure in the noisiest streets of the capital fell as much as 30 decibels.
Some neighbors called it a "seismic silence".
And the truth is that there is more and more digital noise, more sounds caused by machines.
It is impossible to go to a dentist, a supermarket or a restaurant without a background music.
In this sense, by the way, the tradition of tempura restaurants in Japan is curious.
The owners never play music that can distract their guests from the most important sound in that place: the sound of oil crackling when it comes into contact with the dough and food.
That sound is part of rite, of tradition.
Charles Spencer, professor of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford and author of the book
Gastrophysics: The New Science of Food
, argues that if the music is too loud it can mask certain flavors.
One of the most interesting concepts it addresses is that of “sonic seasonings”, that is, how sound can help to bring out a certain flavor.
High sounds, for example, are related to sweetness, and low tones are related to bitter.
Qian Janice Wang, an experimental and computer psychologist who works as an assistant professor in the Department of Food Sciences at the University of Aarhus (Denmark), deepens in this same sense.
His research examines the perception and preference of multisensory flavors, how environmental factors (music and background sounds) can modify and improve the way we perceive food and drink.
His speciality?
The wine.
From Google they already work on devices that allow us to silence people we do not want to listen to when we are with a group of people.
It is an artificial intelligence system capable of analyzing a conversation and dividing the voices so that we can select what interests us.
In other words, a person can eliminate the voice of a third person by pressing a simple button.
Google intends to transfer the so-called “cocktail effect” (the natural human capacity to focus our attention on a specific person in the middle of the noise and other voices) to the technological world through artificial intelligence under a model that they have called
Looking to listen at the Cocktail Party.
Imagine if this model goes from video calls to real conversations.
As Ramón Andrés pointed out before, the immediate risk is that we isolate ourselves and stop interacting with other human beings.
Or even worse, that one of the plots that
Black Mirro
r
already rehearsed
in fiction in an episode of 2014
becomes a reality
: a technology that allows us to block in real life, as we do in digital, people who they don't interest us, they don't think like us.
This Kafkaesque reality seems more plausible than ever.
By the way, Kafka has a beautiful story called
The Big Noise
in which he describes with precision and beauty the sounds of his room: "I am sitting in my room, in the noise headquarters of the whole house. I hear all the doors shutting down. doors; the noise they make closing prevents me from hearing the footsteps of those who pass through them, although I can still hear the oven closing in the kitchen. Father knocks down the door to my room and dragging his robe through it; in the next room They fan the ashes of the heating; Valli asks, shouting from the hall word for word, if he has already cleaned his father's hat; a gurgling, which seems familiar to me, raises the shouting of a voice that answers. There is a knock on the door of the house and makes the same noise as a cold throat, the door opens with the hum of a female voice and closes with a merciless shake. Father is gone, now begins the soft, scattered, hopeless noise, initiated by the
song of the two canaries.
For a long time I thought, with the canaries it occurs to me again, if I couldn't open the door a little, I would crawl like a snake to the next room and from the floor ask my sister and her governess for a bit of silence. "
Apple sold an estimated 60 million pairs of its wireless AirPods in 2019.
In the
Age of Auditing, we
absorb more content through our ears than ever before.
It's possible that as headphones get smarter, our ears, rather than our eyes, may become the primary way we live in the digital world.
Sound reaches places that our eyes cannot, it dives below surfaces and reaches the core, the heart, the center of our bodies.
And technologists know it.
Audio has fully entered capitalism: headphones at the price of luxury brand bags.
TS Elliot said that the world will not end with an explosion, but with a moan.
And, surely, we will listen to it through headphones.