I was fortunate enough to acquire a very very nice new iPhone on Friday, and have since spent most of the week playing with its various features and being generally distracted either by the device itself or envious colleagues.  However, the option to use it as an iPod led me to conduct a previously untried experiment…

 

I often watch people, and have been particularly intrigued by the number and types of people who are plugged in to mp3/portable music devices as they go about their lives in the wider, observable world.  It has always struck me that these people must be experiencing the world in a very different way to those of us with naked eardrums: they effectively have a soundtrack to their movements, like in the films.  Unlike a lot of people I have spoken to on this issue, I have yet to be convinced that this is a bad thing – although I am perfectly sensible to the rudeness it can present under certain circumstances, and the safety risks.  So, armed with my new toy, I decided to try it out for a few days and record my observations.

 

I noticed a variety of things, some of which surprised me and others of which provoked a “Duh! Of course!” reaction.  I shall leave you to distil one from the other:

 

• I prefer to listen to music with my left ear and the world around me with my right, and was often more comfortable with only one earpiece in to this effect

 

• I automatically removed one earpiece (or both) when crossing roads, boarding buses or greeting anyone in passing – no matter how briefly (a standard greeting in this part of the country consisting of: “alright?”… “arr”)

 

• All sorts of visual stimuli seem to sync with the music.  As I type (from the 12:43 London Paddington service from Bath Spa) the clouds of white plumage from the power station funnels at Didcot blend perfectly with In The Bleak Midwinter (arranged by Bob Chilcott), whilst the cows in the fields outside Swindon earlier seemed to walk in time with Defying Gravity from the soundtrack to the musical Wicked, even during tempo changes.  I suspect this is just my brain trying to identify patterns between what I am seeing and what I am hearing, but still interesting…

 

• Outside sounds and the more internal sound of the music create a 2-layer auditory input.  Sorry, I can’t find a better way of phrasing that!  Basically, I mean that the outside sounds around me superimpose over the music (provided the volume is not set too loudly), which creates a strange joint experience of both sound worlds

 

• I am looking around expecting everyone else to hear what I am hearing.  I actually have to visualise a bubble around me to grasp the silence/absence of music around me.  It is quite strange thinking that there are sounds in my ears and head that are not also around my hands or anything else I can see.  This might be getting a bit philosophical, mind.  Actually, now I think about it, I have always had the same issue whilst sitting in a car – particularly on a motorway or busy road in a traffic jam.  I look around me and imagine the chassis of each car acting as the shell of a bubble containing a different mixture of sounds to those I am experiencing.  It seems so odd being close by, but encapsulated in different sounds.  Tangent spotted…

 

• On the more physical side, my eyes hurt a lot more than usual (as I am having to use them to do orientation that I would usually do using my ears) and my ears have a sort of fuzzy skin of ache across them.  This is after only moderate use, on a fairly low volume.

 

Of course, I have focussed on the effects of listening to music so far, so the next step is to test spoken word podcasts.  I’m not sure how easy it will be to concentrate on podcasts whilst going about life on the move, compared to listening to music, but there is one way to find out…