On headphones/earbuds and sound memory

Earbuds (especially those that allow ambient leakage) are particularly interesting when listening to ambient music in outdoor environments. The density of indeterminate pitch elements or slightly pitched elements in urban environments (car horns, car brakes, etc.) often blend in with ambient music in surprising ways--and can be listened to at equal volume as what is coming through the earbuds.

Headphones are essentially inverted microphones: Had sound recording never progressed from using simple microphones, any recordings listened to with headphones would be the experience of replaying ambient sound from another time.

When we take photographs we can view them long into the future and replay the memory of the actual experience. In regards to using headphones, recordings made in the past can be mixed into live ambient sound. (For example recording the sound of a fountain in a busy town square in the summer listened to with earbuds while walking through the same place on a cold January day.)


The Sony Walkman (1980) was the first device to allow the time-shifting of listening. Again, if all recording was done with binaural or stereo microphones, as opposed to mixed-down multi-track recordings, the mobile listening experience would be like viewing photographs or films of wherever you were sitting--like looking at a photo taken in June while sitting there in January. Mobile devices now allow us to overlay the past with the present in real time.

We didn't realize it then, but the Walkman was in essence an 'augmented reality', even if what we were listening to had no connection to where we were. But the brain was in fact processing two experiences at the same time, augmenting memory by binding visual memory and auditory memory. This binding or 'encoding' is what allows the brain to recall experiences from just one input, e.g. a certain song reminding you of a place (and vice versa). Simultaneous stimuli is the 'glue' of memory.

For the smartphone there is now an app called LookBackMaps that allows the overlay of old photographs of various sites in San Francisco with their current state. We can do the same thing with sound.

Listening in the field can be just as important as it binds place with memory, and in this sense, listening is not a way to compartmentalize perception, but to augment it. For this reason, I am not a big proponent of complete sound cancellation in public places, and prefer to balance ambient audio with headphone audio for the purpose of overlaying foreground and background elements.