Strapping on the Ear Goggles: The Wonderfully Uneasy Escape into Headphone-land

The AV Club consistently publishes some of the best writing on media I’ve found on the internet. In this piece, Noel Murray writes on the unique musical experience of headphone listening.

This passage was particularly good:

Headphones invite listeners to immerse, to hear sounds that that are barely audible through ordinary speakers. And, yes, it allows us to distance ourselves from the real world. When combined with actual interaction with the real world—taking a walk, for example—the disconnection adds another level of enjoyment. The music gets juxtaposed with whatever’s encountered along the way, serving as a soundtrack to the moment. And it’s all enhanced by the knowledge that at any moment, the reverie could be broken.

Like Murray, I often listen to music while walking about, whether it’s along the Mississippi river in St. Paul, through downtown Minneapolis, or . Some might say that I am cutting off myself from the world, but I think that I in fact end connecting more deeply to — and focusing better on — the things I see than if I wasn’t listening to music. For me, walking around in busy/loud environments outside is an exercise in distraction. Putting in the earbuds allows me to filter out the excess noise and focus instead on things I find interesting.

Murray also argues that listening to music with headphones offers a kind of freedom that no other listening medium can:

Turn the music up loud. It’s okay. Listen to profanity-laced hip-hop, or giddy showtunes, orThe Best Of Poco. No one will judge you. If you get hit by a car, at least you’ll die on your own terms, with a song to play you out.

Fucking right.