Music and Gadgets
One of the main functions of background music in the everyday environment is related to the “enlivening” and “animation” of the sprawling space of a technologized civilization, in which music is supposed to compensate for the lack of “live” human communication. However, various technical devices mediate human interaction not only with the environment and society, but also actively function in the sphere of private communication of one individual with another. At the same time, these communication processes also often involve musical accompaniment, which makes us pay special attention to them.
Headphones with two wires, which are stretched to a portable player or a cell phone, have become one of the distinctive attributes of modern man. Their emergence and mass distribution not only had a tangible impact on the characteristics of listening to music and the development of the entire music industry, but right before our eyes fundamentally affects the nature of social relationships between people. Therefore, the topic of the use of headphones and portable sound-reproducing devices goes far beyond music itself, directly affecting the problems of the modern civilization environment and its interaction with human beings.
Differences between headphones and background music
We cannot ignore the fact that the desire to move freely in space together with music, embodied through a portable player, is in fact a continuation and development of the need for continuous musical accompaniment of everyday life, formed in modern people under the influence of background music. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the functions of background music and music played in headphones are similar in many ways. However, the ability to independently choose and control the music being played, and to listen to it individually, alone, determine the fundamental differences between headphone music and background music. Read here how to connect two wire speaker.
Whereas background music mediates between the outside world and the individual, creating a sense of dialogue and interaction with the environment, music on headphones, on the contrary, often becomes a way of isolating the individual both from the surrounding space and from the people in it. This feature, in particular, determines the fundamental difference between portable players and the popular at one time portable receivers and tape recorders, which also allowed you to “take” music with you. But the music played from the tape recorder was heard by all the people in the radius of its sound, and the person with the tape recorder on his shoulder was not so much fenced off from the surrounding space, but openly declared his personal tastes and style of behavior in it. With a portable player, on the contrary, a person tries to “fall out” of the surrounding reality, begins to clearly control the degree of his immersion and involvement in the outside world, and tries to outline his personal sound field by creating his own “auditory bubble”.
The main advantage of a portable player is its compactness. And the miniaturization of audio-reproducing devices is inversely proportional to the increase in the volume of their memory. Mobile music storages take up less and less space, but their own space is becoming truly limitless – an entire musical era can fit into a matchbox-sized box. But it is not only music that is being “compressed” and “shrunk. At the same time, both the surrounding world and personal space are shrinking and shrinking – people have to be more “compact” themselves.
A resident of a modern city needs to maneuver in a dense stream of people, cars, buildings, cases, and obligations. The freedom and speed of his movement are in fact very conditional, as a person must correlate his actions with the rhythm of life, rules and prohibitions of the multi-level urban infrastructure. It is no coincidence that portable players are particularly in demand on public transport, where individual movement and personal space are particularly limited. A study by British scientists showed that listening to good music on headphones, a person freely allows other people in his personal space and much easier to endure the discomfort of being in a crowded place. Read here more.
Final Words
Thus, music on headphones not only aesthetizes the surrounding reality, but also contributes to overcoming its hostility. In this case, music compensates for the lack of physical space; one completes the space one needs through hearing and imagination. Playing music on headphones helps to emotionally arrange and psychologically secure the outside world, to make it as comfortable and private as possible, regardless of the number of people present in it. The paradox is that music played on headphones illusorily expands a person’s personal space and at the same time contributes to narrowing this very space, with the help of headphones a person simultaneously fences off from the surrounding reality and increases his personal zone in it.
