Suddenly, we have new powers for controlling our personal acoustic environments. (In other words: quiet!)
Because our goal at Levenger is to inspire readers, writers and thinkers, it’s my pleasure to write with some welcome news. It is the happy confluence of three technologies: sound cancellation, hearing assistance, and miniaturization, all compressed into something no larger than two pieces of macaroni.
We call them earbuds, and they are a boon to all who wish to work in tranquility while also being able to hear voices better. While I thought it looked quite strange when I first saw this macaroni hanging from people’s ears a few years ago, today earbuds are so common as to hardly merit attention.
Rather suddenly, from an evolutionary perspective, we humans can now enhance what we wish to hear and mute what we don't wish to hear, and this newfound power is coming just in time.
Our noisy world
As I write this, I’m sitting at a hotel lobby around 6 am with my dog, Chet. While no other guests are here this early, a television is droning on with a news program, and music designed not to be listened to is so loud as to make it hard not to. If I didn’t have sound cancellation technology, I’d have a hard time concentrating enough to finish this sentence.
The noise in my hotel is typical of hotels, coffee shops, waiting rooms, and other indoor places where people used to be able to read and think in some tranquility. Audio tranquility is hard to find these days. Noise has been spreading over silence like an oil spill.
If you take public transportation, you have to deal not only with the regular high decibel sound of the bus or subway but with fellow passengers, some of whom believe sharing their music is the right thing to do. Walking down the street, we contend with the usual chorus of traffic noise and occasional solo performances by people who pay extra to make their vehicles even louder. Add periodic pulsating sirens and construction machinery, and noise levels can crescendo into the danger zone that can cause hearing damage.
Air travel, meanwhile, presents a special kind of acoustic torment. Travelers endure a parade of public address messages in airports, 99 percent of which are irrelevant. Once inside planes, the hounding gets even worse as the airlines use their PA systems not only to administer obligatory FAA recordings about not tampering with smoke alarms, but also to advertise their credit card programs.
Even in our homes, tranquility can be fleeting. If you live in a city, an ambulance blocks away can be loud enough to hamper a phone call. Living in suburbia can be just as disruptive when a landscaper next door fires up a gas-powered leaf blower.
While loud noise can bother people of all ages, it can be even more annoying for older people with mild or moderate hearing loss. One of the indignities of aging is that as we begin to lose our hearing, we can also become more sensitive to loud noises. (It’s the aural equivalent of losing your vision due to clouded lenses of cataract, while at the same time becoming more sensitive to glare.)
Why conventional hearing aids are obsolete
Traditional hearing aids, those little plastic lobes we see hanging behind the ears of ancianos like me, will soon, I predict, be tossed unceremoniously upon the technological junk heap along with dusty 8-tracks and floppy discs. This is because hearing aids solve, at best, only half the acoustic challenges we face today. And I make this observation after having worn conventional hearing aids for a year.
While hearing aids do help you hear quiet things in quiet environments, hearing aids are practically useless in noisy environments, since they haven’t yet figured out how to distinguish the noise you don’t want to hear from the sounds you do. This wouldn’t be a problem if we generally lived in quiet environments, but quiet environments are increasingly rare, including in American restaurants.
Buying tranquility
The composer George Frideric Handel reportedly paid organ grinders outside his London flat to walk away, taking their organs with them, so that he could have the quiet he needed to write his music. Relief from unwanted noise has always been available for a price. Larger homes on bigger lots are an example, but in recent decades, technology has come to the rescue, even for zero-lot-line homes.
Sound cancellation technologies, beginning with pricey over-the-ear headphones, have been around for 20 years. Now this technology has become less expensive and miniaturized into wireless devices—for example, the Apple AirPod Pros that millions of us presently use.
When you first say hello to your AirPods, Apple offers an onboard hearing test. If you already have the results of one, your phone can scan and use that report instead. Other companies besides Apple will soon follow, if they haven’t already.
Earbuds are the new glasses
Now that the hearing aid business has been deregulated and the technological leaps of hearing augmentation, sound cancellation, and miniaturization are here, social norms are shifting.
I attended a Spanish-language practice group recently where I didn’t know anyone there. After a few minutes of speaking around a table, I put in my AirPods and mentioned offhandedly, “They help me hear better.” (Actually, I said, “Para escuchar mejor.”) The group nodded in instant understanding. While wearing them around town, I’m doing what so many people of all ages do as they take control of their personal acoustic environment.
I predict that soon, earbuds will be as socially acceptable as eyeglasses.
As the technology continues to improve and shrink, and as AI comes more into the picture (more into the sound, I should say), further advances will come rapidly. I can imagine a time when a party of six will go to a restaurant, and AI (which will have already digitally scanned their voices) will help you and your friends mainly hear one another while muting other voices—until you wish to hear your server describe the specials.
But future aside, today, here and now, we suddenly can enjoy a level of control over our personal acoustic environments that would have amazed us just a few years ago. Hooray to the engineers and designers who have delivered to us this huge life enhancement that readers, writers, and thinkers can enjoy. We can work in more tranquility, listen to our music in marvelous fidelity, and understand the joke at the other end of the table—all with the same silly-looking macaroni in our ears.
Steve Leveen
Co-Founder