Don't Let Go

[Pedaling Prince]

"Listening to music on headphones is essentially different than listening to speakers. When you listen to speakers, both ears receive the output of both speakers but in different proportions. Your right ear will hear more of the right speaker, and the left ear more of the left. And because the left ear is slightly farther away from the right speaker, it hears the right signal a fraction of a second later than the right ear. This time difference between the ears is one of the main cues that your brain uses to figure out the left-to-right position of sounds.

When you listen to headphones each ear will only receive one channel. The sound isn't mixed, and there are no time differences. In short: the listening experience lacks any similarity to natural hearing. Any regular headphones user will be familiar with the problems this causes: the stereo image is lost due to extreme separation of the left and right channels and has no discernible phantom center (the non-existent 'center speaker' that vocals often appear to come from when listening to speakers). Sound sources are impossible to locate and, because of the unnatural stereo image, ear fatigue sets in even after short listening sessions."

When you're not used to headphone listening this can be very true; the first time you hear music through headphones can actually be a rather disorienting experience. I remember the first time I listened to music through headphones. I was maybe five or six years old at the time, and I found that when I got up and moved (and I tend to move when listening to music ) it felt like the whole room was spinning. I found out much later, as an adult, that this happens because it's unnatural for the left-right orientation of sound to follow the movements of the head the way it does when you're wearing 'phones. Fortunately, our bodies' senses are almost endlessly adaptable and, over time, you get used to this effect. Nowadays I can march down the street with my iPhone in my ears and move any direction I wish without feeling unusual in any way.

In my opinion, the above considerations are valid but the effects described may be a little exaggerated compared to the average listener's experience. The "fatigue" mentioned might be true of some people but, by and large, I think most of us are pretty used to listening to music over headphones and earbuds thanks to the Walkman revolution of the 1980s all the way up to the iPod revolution of today. While the two listening modes clearly sound very different, I personally am equally comfortable listening either way. In fact, there are times when I prefer the sound of headphones as it feels like they're putting the sound right in my head, which is particularly useful if I'm using music to inspire a scene for a screenplay I'm writing; I find headphones much more "immersive" and therefore conducive to completely losing yourself in the moment, which in turn can help a great deal in reaching the emotional core of a character of a scene being written.