In a TV advertisement for Beats by Dre headphones, the 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick pulls up in a bus to a crowd of angry people. “You suck!” a young woman yells, as others throw objects at his window. Without flinching, Kaepernick reaches for a pair of headphones. The jeering ceases and is replaced by a hip-hop track, and the slogan “Hear What You Want” appears on the screen. It’s a fitting tagline for a society that is both steeped in noise and obsessed with individualism. In cities like New York, computers whir on our desks, jackhammers pound on the streets, airplanes roar overhead, and silence has become, as Chloe Schama noted in The New Republic, a luxury product. If you commute on mass transit, you’ll notice riders wearing flashy headsets, many of whom look a little stoned. These days, headphones not only transmit sound—they can also block it out.
I was oblivious of noise cancellation until earlier this year, when I tried out a pair of headphones in an Apple store. Time stood still: for better or for worse, there was nothing in the world but Justin Timberlake’s “Mirrors.” The experience felt oddly adolescent—suddenly, the attention that I was focussing on a song was as intense as it had been in high school.
For years, I was an obsessive student of rock music, but sometime in my sophomore year of college I lost the will, or the ability, to memorize entire albums and to recite songwriting credits backward in my sleep. Digital-file sharing only hastened my musical decline: the bootlegged demos I'd meticulously catalogued gathered dust while I ripped my classmates’ albums from a shared online library. Later, I started downloading individual songs from iTunes, and before I knew it my playlists consisted mainly of hit singles. Soon, the song itself didn’t matter: it was a track’s genetic material—tempo, pitch, lyrics, genre—that formed the basis for an algorithm, generating anonymous playlists through services like Pandora.
“Mirrors” is not a particularly moving or complex song (though it is deceptively catchy), but if I could experience it so intensely in a crowded store in downtown Manhattan, I thought, maybe noise-cancellation technology could help me regain my old listening habits. The first obstacle was the price tag: most well-reviewed options are in the three-hundred-dollar range. But the cost hasn’t put off shoppers: the amount of money spent on noise-cancelling headphones has more than doubled since 2011, according to Ben Arnold, an analyst at the NPD Group, a market-research firm. In 2013, Arnold says, fourteen per cent of headphone sales came from noise-cancelling models, in part because technology has changed the way that people access media. Today, more and more people watch videos and listen to music on personal devices, like phones and tablets, while commuting and travelling in more hectic, noisier environments.
Branding gives headphones an element of “life-style identification,” which, Arnold says, helps to drive sales. This is especially true in the case of Beats by Dre, which holds nearly half the market. Dr. Dre, a successful producer in his own right, is estimated to have pocketed two hundred and fifty million dollars after the company sold a minority stake to a private-equity group—more than he ever made from hits like “Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang.”
There are two types of noise cancellation: the “passive” kind, which blocks out sounds with a physical barrier (think earplugs), and the “active” kind, which is the technology that you’ll find in noise-cancelling headphones. Tiny, built-in microphones pick up external sounds and then generate vibrations to negate them. (Like other electronics, the headphones need to be charged.)
Mack Hagood, an assistant professor of media studies at Miami University, in Ohio, explains the technology with an analogy. “In Greek mythology, the sirens sang a song that drew sailors’ attention and led them into peril,” Hagood says. “Odysseus would tie himself to the mast so he could get safe passage, but Orpheus would play his lyre that created beautiful music and cancelled out the sirens’ song. Odysseus was passively repressing the sound; Orpheus was using sound to fight sound.”
Hagood finds these Orphic sounds existentially troubling. Active noise-cancellation technology copies the real-life sound environment “in order to negate its phenomenological existence,” he wrote in a recent paper. He told me, “We’re living in this era where our attention has been commodified, and there’s always something to click on. We don’t feel super in control of our relationship with the media around us.”
Noise-cancellation technology has become a widespread feature of headphones only in the past four or five years, but the science behind it has been around for decades. In 2000, Bose (the No. 2 manufacturer, with forty per cent of sales) was the first company to market the technology to consumers, originally beckoning business and first-class air travellers to “escape the noise” with its QuietComfort headphones. Bose is privately held and declined to provide sales figures, but Bernice Cramer, the director of sales for its noise-reduction division, said that a much more diverse group of consumers have started using the headphones. She said that this was owing in part to people doing more work, off-hours, in public places, like coffee shops. “They have a need to control their environment and create a place where they can focus,” she said.
Tim Gideon, who reviews headphones for PC Magazine, says that the effectiveness of active noise-cancellation technology is overblown. “I think what attracts consumers is often the misconception that you can eliminate office chitchat, or the Crash Test Dummies song when it comes on at your coffee shop,” he explained in an e-mail. “A pair with no music playing would most likely not drown out the playlist from hell…. You’re going to need some Radiohead or Alton Ellis.”
My experience with Bose’s QuietComfort 3 headphones, which I bought a few months ago, has been consistent with Gideon’s assessment: they counteract low-level background din well on their own, especially in transit, but only when a song is playing do external sounds disappear. Still, I’m not sure that they’ve helped me become a better listener. I haven’t regained the ability to plow through Nick Cave’s entire discography in a week; my thumb still twitches for the skip button when a song starts to drag. I did listen to five full albums on a recent flight from London, but that in-flight listening binge was mostly thanks to the lack of a phone and an Internet connection. Headphones can tame only one category of stimuli; on the ground, countless inaudible distractions remain.
I also discovered that an artificially imposed lack of noise can make perfectly normal sounds—the hum of a fan, or a colleague’s phone conversation—feel like an assault on the senses. The quiet becomes habit-forming, and I’m not entirely convinced that that’s desirable. What good is it to live in the world if we just choose to ignore it?
Tim Gideon described his own experience using noise-cancelling headphones. For about three years, a school next to his apartment was undergoing thunderous renovations. “The construction sounds were way too inconsistent for noise-cancelling headphones to have had a real effect,” he said. He listened to loud music to make the situation more bearable. When the construction stopped, there was a new kind of noise: the shouts of children. This, too, was loud, but it wasn’t a sound that he wanted to escape from. “Now the school is open, and we hear the cacophony of children screaming at each other on the playground all day,” Gideon said. “They are joyful sounds. They make me smile.”
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is an editor at Al Jazeera America and The New Inquiry.
Photograph: Andi Singer/Getty.