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.”
If given the chance, a human being will use tools to minimize discomfort. It’s hard to take philosophical issue with, say, a face-blocking neck gaiter on the ski slopes. Still, I think we’ve reached the point of too much noise cancelling, because, when our individual audio realities become entirely avoidable, our public auditory landscapes get worse. Think of it as a version of the tragedy of the commons: If you can simply don your puffy AirPods Max and block out road construction outside or the loud stereo blaring from next door, there’s less impetus to address the underlying issues of urban noise pollution or neighborly accountability. In that sense, noise-cancelling headphones are a fundamentally antisocial technology.
A new, rather strange headphone design recently produced by the Japanese company N.T.T. Sonority (a spinoff of a major Japanese telecommunications corporation) attempts something different. The company’s nwm ONE headphones (which cost two hundred and ninety-nine dollars per pair) look like the denuded skeleton of the familiar Bose model. They feature no solid cup, just a plastic armature that allows a conical speaker to hover slightly off the tragus. The armature is supported by an empty ring, which is cushioned for comfort, around the ear. Thus, the ears of the person wearing it are exposed—a peekaboo that lends both the device and its user a quality somewhere between futuristic and nerdy, or maybe both at once. (“You look like a robot,” my wife said when she first saw me wearing them.) But the open armature means that you can hear what is going on around you and listen to your preferred audio at the same time, without resorting to a complex digital filter that decides what you can make out, as the “aware” or “transparency” modes on other headphones attempt to do. The pointed speakers are “directional,” beaming sound straight into the user’s ears so that it barely leaks; only a person standing within inches of you can hear any noise, and even then, according to my informal tests, not more than a slight buzz. The device offers a technological solution to a problem caused in the first place by an excess of technology. The nwm ONE’s tagline is “Unmute the world,” as if it were not also possible to do so simply by taking off your headphones.
As I’ve been using the nwm ONE in the past week, my exhibitionistically unveiled ears have earned me a number of bemused stares. The archetypal designs of personal technology these days are so well established that few products are as blatantly new looking. But there is something of a throwback quality to the user experience, too. Wearing the nwm ONEs feels a bit like having an invisible man follow you around with a tiny stereo, like John Cusack in “Say Anything,” that only you can hear. Without the added plastic and foam of typical over-ear headphones, the device is remarkably light. I often forgot I was wearing them. Noise-cancelling headphones tend to create miniature saunas of oil and sweat, whereas these allow for plenty of airflow, making them much more comfortable in summer weather. But the biggest advantage I’ve found is logistical. It’s simply easier to navigate a city street when you can hear what’s going on around you. The nwm ONE has been particularly useful for me while walking my dog. I can listen on the headphones while still hearing when there’s a cyclist coming up behind me on trails, making the kind of subtle sound that digital filters often block, or another dog owner trying to warn me to steer clear on the street. Walking through the woods, I found the noise of cicadas and rustling leaves a pleasant accompaniment to a podcast; I didn’t mind the interpenetration. But I’ve found that casual music listening is easier on the device than paying close attention to speaking voices, which can blend in with outside chatter. No matter how thoughtfully designed the pair of headphones, being in your own world and in the outside one simultaneously requires making trade-offs.
The nwm ONE represents a rare case in today’s tech industry of making a device less powerful than it could be. Takuto Takizawa, a product-development manager at N.T.T., and Shogo Nishiyori, the company’s director of overseas marketing and sales, told me in an e-mail that fully sealing your ears is “unnatural.” Staring at an iPhone is unnatural, too, of course, though we still do it all the time. We digitally mediate our lives in ways that often lead us to feel more isolated; we don’t know what others are seeing on their algorithmically personalized social-media accounts or streaming services. Perhaps that’s why the idea of open headphones feels so novel: they give us a chance to preserve the auditory commons before it goes the way of the information ecosystem, fractured and atomized. In his 1984 article on the Walkman, Hosokawa wrote that un-headphoned pedestrians, listening communally to a loud radio or a street musician, can “feel a recovery of the lost links of social life.” The listener in 2024 can at least recover a hint of that collective feeling, even while continuing to indulge privately in constant content overload. ♦
