Before
recording technologies became available, music was a primarily social
affair. Live performance was the only avenue to experience music,
whether it be at the opera, dancehall, or church. Since the inception
of recordings, and then headphones, and then personal listening
devices, that musical experience has become mainly a conduit between
one person and their audio components.
Headphones have been
around for the better part of a century, invented in the
early 1920s by a Utahan named Nathaniel Baldwin who subsequently spent
the money he made from the invention on a dead-end gold mine and a
vacation spot he dubbed "Polygamy Alley". Baldwin's headphones were
clunky, slightly dangerous, and mainly used for radio transmissions. It
wasn't until the 1950s that John Koss invented the stereo headphone
that we know today.
Still, it wasn't until the Sony Walkman,
invented by Akio Morita, came along that headphones became a common
accessory. That combination of portability and independence provided
was a huge success. Parents no longer needed to be annoyed by the music
tastes of their children. Children no longer needed to interact with
their parents. Everybody could be satisfied with their own preferences.
They were the logical accoutrement of the '80s.
Even from its
inception, the Walkman was criticized for its anti-social, atomizing
effects. It was also feared as a harbinger of unfettered capitalism and
ignorance, although many other products could fall under the latter
categories too. A Tokyo professor by the name of Shuhei Hosokawa
countered that the Walkman actually empowered people in urban spaces
who had been alienated from "harmonious contact with nature". Listening
to music this way might create a secret audio theater which could
transform a person's perceived landscape into something they
controlled.
That was the bonus of the Walkman. But Hosokawa
also described the sharing of music from Walkman to Walkman, something
akin to making a mixtape or sending someone a leaked album, as
"incompossible communication which establishes a radically positive
distance", or, in other words, a shallower form of interaction. He
considered that experience as a cheapened form of listening with its
simplicity, immediacy, and low fidelity.
This still holds true
now that iPods and mp3s have made the Walkman obsolete. You can
approximate fidelity far beyond what any reasonable listener would
notice with higher bit-rate files, but it's the 128kbps mp3—that
easily downloadable nexus of decent compression and respectable quality—that is the de facto format. It is certainly possible to connect an
iPod to a single-ended, mono-block, tube amp and play Pink Floyd's Dark
Side of the Moon on repeat, but you still need a computer. Mobile
devices are surrogates of other computers. They don't hold much on
their own. It's a temporary detachment and computers don't make for
simple interfaces.