Acoustics of the one person space: headphone listening, detachable ambience, and the binaural prehistory of VR

ABSTRACT

This article traces forgotten debates over the cultural acceptability of headphone listening in order to present an audio-centric history of private virtual space. I focus on how cultural attitudes towards headphone use transformed in tandem with developments in 3D binaural audio, new practices of solitary listening, and sound engineers’ attempts to solve the “sound in the head” problem accompanying headphone use. Extending Jonathan Sterne’s work on the “detachable echo” of modern sound mixing to what I call the detachable ambience of head-mounted spatial audio, I explore what happens when headphone listening eliminates the mediation of the surrounding physical space to create a solitary virtual acoustics. Examining the post-Walkman normalisation of headphone use, I argue it was only with the architectural emergence of what Nango Yoshikazu calls the “one person space” that headphone listening became acceptable as a personal media practice, setting the stage for more recent debates over the privatised three-dimensional space of the virtual reality head-mounted display.

KEYWORDS:

• Headphones
• binaural
• acoustic space
• virtual reality (VR)
• detachable ambience
• Japan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For a more recent example, see Mannering (2015).

2. See also Thibaud (2003).

3. For example, Ian Chambers (1990) describes the Walkman as part of a transformation of the city from an “organizer of space” to a technological focus on the “organization of time.” While less explicitly about headphones, see also DeNora (2000), Fink (2005), LaBelle (2010), Roquet (2016a).

4. Bose’s wearable audio-only augmented reality glasses are the most prominent product along these lines so far, but spatial audio has made inroads in many areas of audio production and consumption. The Audio Engineering Society, the main professional organisation for audio engineers, focused on mobile spatial audio and AR audio (along with assistive listening) as key themes for their 2019 conference. On sound AR, see Hagood (2018).

5. See Bull (2007) for an example of the “Western” framing. This is despite important early Walkman studies focused on East Asian contexts including Hosokawa ([1984] 2012) and Chow (1990).

6. On telephone switchboards in Japan, see Yoshimi ([1995] 2012), Yasar (2018, 48–51).

7. Bell first used a dummy head named Oscar to produce a binaural recording of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Microphones at the time were too large to be situated within the dummy head’s ears, so Oscar had microphones on his cheeks instead (Krebs 2017, 119–20). As with the examples below, the implied “average” listener here is explicitly gendered male.

8. Cook’s binaural records were also available as imports for purchase, but were still too expensive for average Japanese consumers at the time (priced around 3,000 yen or $89 USD in 1955 prices). As New Electronics [Shin denki] magazine complained at the time (1955, 113), to experience 3D sound it was still far cheaper to just go to a live concert.

9. See also Sutereo haifai seisaku dokuhon (1962, 14).

10. On the long-running quest to render hearing aids “invisible,” see Mills (2011).

11. See also Keightley (1996) and Weber (2010, 347).

12. The skewed gender ratio of producers and engineers being overwhelmingly male but characters and persona populating virtual spaces presenting as predominantly female persists in the context of Japanese VR today. On the gendering of proximate binaural whispers in a more recent ASMR context, see Andersen (2015).

13. See Blesser and Salter (2006, 186–91) for a detailed examination of the acoustics of in-head localisation.

14. As Blesser and Salter note (2006, 188) this problem occurs because individual differences in the shape of the external ears (the pinna) are crucial to how the brain locates sounds in front or behind the body – a generic or averaged outer ear like the dummy head’s is ineffective. Recent binaural research has focused on how to incorporate individual 3D scans of a listener’s pinna into the spatial audio processing to provide a more custom virtual localisation. In the Japan context see Nishimaki (1976, 250).

15. On the complex history of promises of audio fidelity, see Sterne (2003, 215–86).

16. See Roquet (2016a) for more on the broader turn to ambient aesthetics at the time.

17. See Shu Ueyama excerpt in Gay et al. (2013, 131–2).

18. Facebook would later make a similar bet by focusing on less powerful but more convenient “stand-alone” VR headsets like the Oculus Go and Oculus Quest.

19. See Stankievech (2007) for later sound art examples.

20. On similar trends in Japan, see Roquet (2016a); in the US, see Hagood (2019).

21. A related phenomenon emerged in the US by the mid-1980s, popularised by marketing consultant Faith Popcorn as cocooning, a practice of staying inside the home surrounded by video cassette recorders and compact disc players rather than venturing out into the “scary” outside world. Popcorn describes cocooning in 1987 as “a rapidly accelerating trend toward insulating oneself from the harsh realities of the outside world and building the perfect environment to reflect one’s personal needs and fantasies.” Quoted in Krier (1987).

22. For a helpful breakdown of binaural and holophonic techniques and issues with the latter, see Mark A. Jay’s posts to the Gearslutz discussion board in the “holophonic vs. binaural” thread (Jay 2010).

23. See Jones (1993, 244), Blesser and Salter (2006, 194–98).

24. The quote is from Crary (1990, 102).

25. The phrase was echoed in a recent viral hashtag on Japanese Twitter describing the VR headset as a “tv attached to your face” [atama ni tsukeru terebi], after Tokyo musician Katsunori Adachi noted his wife had used the phrase to search for a picture of the Oculus Go headset online. Some early hand-built VR headsets did, in fact, use a pair of small portable televisions for the head-mounted display.

26. The “Densha de Go” train gathering was organised by the Oculus Go o tanoshimu kai [Society for enjoying the Oculus Go] Discord group and held on 19 May 2018.

27. Augmented reality devices have also triggered social pushback in the US, like the early banning of Google Glass users in some San Francisco bars. See Roquet (2016b) for a related analysis of the social “seamfulness” of AR glasses.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Japan Foundation Japanese Studies research fellowship (long term).

Notes on contributors

Paul Roquet

Paul Roquet is associate professor of Media Studies and Japan Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Comparative Media Studies/Writing), and the author of Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (Minnesota, 2016). His work focuses on the cultural politics of mediated space in contemporary Japan. https://proquet.mit.edu