Headphone Space People walk through New York City with headphones on. Navigating the crowded streets of cars, people, advertisements, posters, shops, restaurants, television displays, lights, noise, dirt, steam, trees, animals, garbage, construction and decay, they walk alone occupying a private space within the public sphere. This private space is marked by sound emanating from headphones which only the user can hear. The sound compliments their living experience, blanketing the immediacy of the physical environment with a personal layer of thoughts, memories, associations, juxtapositions, and projections.

Interpreting our environment is a sensorial experience of mixing sights, sounds, smells, and touch. We live in a visually dominated culture because sight is more easily manipulated for messaging. Urban experience is a bombardment of visual spectacle sending us massive amounts of commercial information in such dense layers that we are often unaware of how we actually filter and interpret that content. The information barrage is accepted as part of the public experience. Consider the sounds that assist these messages in their context -- sounds of the car horns and bird-like screams of young girls outside of MTV Studios playing as a soundtrack for walking through Times Square, or the crack of baseball bats and barking dogs as a soundtrack for the eating a hotdog in Central Park. Spaces are interpreted through the blending of sight and sound. So, if while walking through Times Square you were to hear ocean waves crashing instead of car horns and screaming teenage girls, your sensorial experience would be completely changed and along with it, meaning.

Headphones let us customize public space with controllable, private sound. The visuals in a public environment remain the same, but with the introduction of a personal soundtrack, the context of the shared images change. Take for example, riding a subway train. The mundane experience of standing in a crowded train, surrounded by sullen faces observing Budweiser posters and ignoring the occasional vagabond rant, becomes an entirely new experience when set to the music of soprano Maria Callas singing Ave Maria. Depending on the style of headphones or volume level, different amounts of external sound may leak into the private music experience, mixing the content both of the song and public space.

As small plastic objects, headphones nestle close or sometimes inside our ears, cutting out extraneous noise. We “plug in” to our portable audio device, separating ourselves from the sounds of the external world as we move through from one environment to the next. While headphones isolate us, they simultaneously open the world in new interpretive ways. A schizophrenic experience is created as the listener can occupy two spaces at once, building an entirely new psychological blend of the private and public space. Combinatorial in influencing meaning, headphones’ portability allow the personal sound space to move from place to the next, adding intersections of layered interpretation and thought. Included at these intersections are the users’ own memories and personal relationships to the songs they hear, which construct even deeper meaning and subtext within the physical environment they move through. Listening to a certain song that reminds you of a past lover while walking to meet a stranger for a date might flood your thoughts with new, complicated emotions and questions that would otherwise have remained unexamined.

Headphone space is not invisible. Headphones are physical objects. The sound emanating from them may be a private experience for the user, but the headphones themselves are a visible door to this auditory world. Seen by other people, headphones communicate a “do not disturb” message, like a sign on the door of a hotel room. They delineate a clear line of private space within the public space. Headphone wearers are socially excused from listening regardless of whether or not they can actually hear what is happening outside of their headphone space. In fact, headphones are often worn to create the illusion of separation in order to avoid human interaction or responsibility. People choose to symbolically excuse themselves from the world by putting on their headphones, and also manipulate (perhaps secretively) the levels of their isolation through volume control. These decisions to put on headphones inorder to "exit the room" are intentional, and as a result of this behavior, headphones have in essence become socially recognized, private spaces.

There are many provocative ways to use headphone space as a site to explore themes of personal vs shared and private vs public space while probing its inherent intersections of layered space. Consider the concepts of intimacy that result from sharing a headphone space, perhaps the same set of headphones worn simultaneously by two or even one hundred people; or concepts of manipulation and ownership if a set of headphones are controlled not by its user, but rather by an audience. Art and design projects exploring headphone space include Alice Wang’s Peer Pressure, Michelle Rosenberg’s Dynamic Headphones series, Paul Davies’ The Prayer Antenna, and Cre8tive Challenge’s Echo Ricochet, just to name a few. Headphone space is rich with content and metaphor. As the technological and aesthetic design of headphones advance, more complex relationships with these objects are sure emerge as the space grows denser with human experience and meaning.