In the early 21st century, headphones have become emblematic of the act of listening.  By collapsing all distance between the source of sound and its destination in the human ear, headphones promise an immediacy that makes other forms of listening seem weak and compromised by comparison.  Thanks largely to the increasing portability of sound, represented first by the Walkman and now by the iPod, headphone listening is no longer the exclusive domain of the audiophile, but has in fact become the default mode of musical experience. Listening to speakers has taken on a burdensome character comparable to dialing a rotary phone or adjusting rabbit-ears.

While new technologies such as the CD and the MP3 have successively streamlined the process of listening to recorded music— think of the careful unsheathing of the disc, or the ceremonial laying of the needle on the record— the act of listening over loudspeakers retains something of the musical ritual.  Headphones follow you obediently wherever you go, but speakers locate the listener in relation to its source.  Sound occupies the room: even a solitary listener is addressed by music in a different way.  It is not a voice in your head.  It is real and tangible.

The best seats in a movie theater are not in the front row, and the idea that headphones offer the most powerfully concentrated form of musical experience is based ultimately on the spurious assumption that we listen only with our ears.  The Sufi writer Hazrat Inayat Khan has brilliantly put this notion to rest:

“The physical effect of sound has a great influence upon the human body.  The whole mechanism, the muscles, the blood circulation, the nerves, are all moved by the power of vibration.  As there is a resonance for every sound, so the human body is a living resonator for sound.  Although by sound one can easily produce a resonance in all such substances as brass and copper, yet there is no greater and more living resonator of sound thatn the human body.  Sound has an effect on each atom of the body, for each atom resounds; on all glands, on the circulation of the blood and on pulsation, sound has an effect….

“But a person does not hear sound only through his ears; he hears sound through every pore of his body.  It permeates the entire being, and according to its particular influence either slows the rhythm or quickens the rhythm of the blood circulation; it either wakens the nervous system or soothes it.  It arouses a person to greater passion or it calms him by bringing him peace.  According to the sound and its influence a certain effect is produced.” (The Mysticism of Sound and Music)

August 13, 2009, 4:48pm