The New Yorker:

A new Japanese-designed device promises to “unmute the world,” as if it were no longer possible to do so simply by uncovering your ears.

By Kyle Chayka

We live in a world of virtual reality, but not the kind suggested by Apple’s Vision Pro goggles, the Meta Quest, or any of the other bulky V.R. headsets now for sale. It already exists in our ears. On any given city street or subway car, it sometimes seems as though more people than not have blocked off their ears. Some have the small antennas of AirPods peeking out of their auricles. Others have the obtrusive cups designed by Sony or Bose clamped to the sides of their heads like minimalist Mickey Mouse ears. Many of these devices are equipped with noise-cancelling technology that muffles the ambient sound of the world—honking cars, yelling children, clacking keyboards—by emitting vibrations of the opposite frequency. They can even be tuned to allow in some noises, like nearby voices, but not others; the headphone-wearer can opt out of the grating in her surrounding reality and pipe in the desirable, perhaps an album or a podcast.

Noise-cancelling headphones were first sold by Bose, in 1989, to allow pilots to communicate over engine noise. In the past several years, they have gone from a relatively niche productivity tool—an antidote to the distractions of the open office—to a near-universal accessory, and, thus, something of a scourge. A day rarely goes by without some sensorially absent stranger almost running into me on the sidewalk or without me perpetrating the same annoyance myself. Similar complaints about headphones, however, are about as old as mobile listening itself. The invention of Sony’s Walkman, released in 1979, marked the first time recorded music could be consumed on the go using headphones. In 1984, in an article for the journal Popular Music, the musicologist Shuhei Hosokawa wrote that the Walkman listener “seems to cut the auditory contact with the outer world where he really lives: seeking the perfection of his ‘individual’ zone of listening.”

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