Noise canceling technology in headphones changes the whole way someone listens to music or any other audio experience in that it doesn’t overpower external noise, it erases them. The solution to turn up the volume to drown out unwanted sounds like Aunt Petunia or the roar of the engine in an airplane doesn’t apply anymore for users with noise canceling headphones. The solution to nagging or thunderous noise is simply to switch the noise canceling button on and listen to a file of your choosing. Noise canceling technology privatizes someone’s own audio space even more than normal headphones can, and the technology comes with health benefits as well. This technology doesn’t just make someone’s life have fewer distractions, it can lower hearing
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The last piece of technology in modern headphones takes advantage of the human anatomy. Plenty of people absolutely need bass in their lives and demand it for their personal audio experience. The problem that engineers tackle when it comes to making their headphones have satisfactory bass is that the source is so small. It’s easy to provide a large amount of gut-vibrating, eyeball rupturing bass when the speaker it’s coming from is huge. Go to Beta nightclub, stand in front of one of their Funktion-One speakers, and erase any doubts you have if that doesn’t make sense to you (just do so with some earbuds). In reality, headphones will never produce the same bass response a massive speaker will but headphones have the advantage of literally being right on the skull. Due to their proximity to the listener’s skull, headphones can take advantage of a process called inertial bone conduction. This means that lower frequency sounds actually vibrate the whole skull, but the inner ear sensory sub-systems that are suspended stay still. This tricks the mind into perceiving sound as if sound waves were moving the inner ear sensory sub-systems while the head stayed still . Large, over the ear headphones, are able to take advantage of this more than on the ear headphones because the headphone …show more content…
In the near future, startup companies like the Australia-based Nura can further personalize your music by tuning it to how sound is perceived by your ears. By quickly mapping the user’s ears, it boosts the frequencies their ears simply weren’t made very well to hear . At this point in time, that sounds about as individualized as listening to music can get. Audio quality could go through the roof as well, as lossless audio files would be relatively small compared to the storage capabilities of the hard drives that would host them. Longer (compared to the immediate future) term improvements could be the unification of the headphone and the media player, potentially making electrostatic headphones portable and providing the highest quality sounds on the go. Perhaps in a pseudo-singularity future, the headphones become a part of the user by directly interacting with and manipulating the audio sensory sub-systems in the ear. Perhaps skipping the ear completely and stimulating music directly to the brain could happen instead. All of these, in one way or another further the music listening experience as an isolated pastime, and while it’s impossible to tell the future, it’s hard to envision one where listening to music reverts to being something done mostly with
The last piece of technology in modern headphones takes advantage of the human anatomy. Plenty of people absolutely need bass in their lives and demand it for their personal audio experience. The problem that engineers tackle when it comes to making their headphones have satisfactory bass is that the source is so small. It’s easy to provide a large amount of gut-vibrating, eyeball rupturing bass when the speaker it’s coming from is huge. Go to Beta nightclub, stand in front of one of their Funktion-One speakers, and erase any doubts you have if that doesn’t make sense to you (just do so with some earbuds). In reality, headphones will never produce the same bass response a massive speaker will but headphones have the advantage of literally being right on the skull. Due to their proximity to the listener’s skull, headphones can take advantage of a process called inertial bone conduction. This means that lower frequency sounds actually vibrate the whole skull, but the inner ear sensory sub-systems that are suspended stay still. This tricks the mind into perceiving sound as if sound waves were moving the inner ear sensory sub-systems while the head stayed still . Large, over the ear headphones, are able to take advantage of this more than on the ear headphones because the headphone …show more content…
In the near future, startup companies like the Australia-based Nura can further personalize your music by tuning it to how sound is perceived by your ears. By quickly mapping the user’s ears, it boosts the frequencies their ears simply weren’t made very well to hear . At this point in time, that sounds about as individualized as listening to music can get. Audio quality could go through the roof as well, as lossless audio files would be relatively small compared to the storage capabilities of the hard drives that would host them. Longer (compared to the immediate future) term improvements could be the unification of the headphone and the media player, potentially making electrostatic headphones portable and providing the highest quality sounds on the go. Perhaps in a pseudo-singularity future, the headphones become a part of the user by directly interacting with and manipulating the audio sensory sub-systems in the ear. Perhaps skipping the ear completely and stimulating music directly to the brain could happen instead. All of these, in one way or another further the music listening experience as an isolated pastime, and while it’s impossible to tell the future, it’s hard to envision one where listening to music reverts to being something done mostly with