Hear the Music

By losing your headphones

By Marvin Cho

Illustration by Selin Ho

Take a stroll down Broadway. What do you hear?

A conversation among friends walking to lunch, whose precise words escape you, but not the ring of joy they contain? 

The wail of an ambulance heralding the crisis of a life, a turning point in one person’s story?

Birds? The rustle of trees? The earthly tapping of your own shoes against the pavement?

Or, do you hear, instead, a curated list of your favorite titles, lyrics that resonate with you so fervently that they drown out all else around you?

I don’t pose these questions to assert some kind of superiority over those who swear by their wireless headphones. Nor do I have any intention to regurgitate the same old arguments against the constant use of headphones—stunted productivity, worsened isolation, bad manners—that, although valid, have undoubtedly been heard ad nauseam by all. In fact, until a few weeks ago when I lost my AirPods purely by mistake, I could not bear the thought of a single walk from Carlton Arms to campus without a soundtrack. But it is within this new headphone-free boredom that I’ve taken notice of how this deep-ingrained technology has changed how we relate to art and (what amounts to the same thing) the world around us. 

It may be difficult to notice the unprecedentedness in our current dynamic between listener, headphone, and music; but once it is pointed out, it is impossible to unrecognize. When, in the history of the relation between us and our arts, have we been able to so finely curate and select the art we experience at a moment-by-moment basis, to accord with our daily, hourly or even minutely passions? A visitor at a museum is taken aback by a painting as they chance to walk by it, and it is in this taking aback that they truly experience the painting. The greatness of a novel is only truly experienced in the new feelings it is able to stir in the reader, through the organic dance between the reader’s shifting assumptions and the novel’s unexpected developments. How absurd would it be if someone, already feeling overwhelmed by various deadlines for school or career, could pull out Courbet’s Le Désespéré from their back-pocket, in order to intentionally reduplicate their internal moment of despair with something external? How absurd would it be if someone, fresh off of a ticklish run-in with a campus crush, is able to treat themselves to the entire literary force of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, so that it would give life to their own impulsive romantic dreamings that arise in the moment? And what makes Giacomo Puccini’s aria Nessun Dorma, in Turandot, the musical masterwork that it is? Is it not its ever-unforeseen effect on its audience, who, despite having expected the performance for weeks, are somehow still astonished by the climactic, resounding squillo of “Vincero!” piercing a new majesty into their lives? What would Puccini think of the fact that his sublime “Vincero!” now plays under the command of just a few taps of the phone, echoing feebly through little speakers to serve the listener’s every little triumph? The absolute power we hold over what art we experience, when and where we experience it, our ability to precisely calibrate external artistic effect to momentary internal feeling, has reached an absurd level.

Anyone who ascribes to art some value beyond mere pleasure-making can recognize that such an absolute power perverts our experience of it. Martin Heidegger concludes in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” that art, by opening up a transcendent “World” upon the material “Earth,” results in the “unconcealing of Truth.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, known for his hermeneutical aesthetics, treats art as an interlocutor who “says something to someone.” At the least, then, art stands to us as an equal, a co-operator who will help us attain some higher truth; at the most, art is synonymous with the happening of that higher Truth itself. Although no one denies the need for our subjective participation as interpreters of the art, the art itself must first exist as something external and independent, or at least not wholly subservient, to the will of the subject that beholds it. It is art’s ability to impress some new, unexpected or even uncomfortable feeling onto our minds, with which we are forced to internally grapple or come to terms, that makes it art. The AirPod and the music app subverts this essential feature by making it servile and sycophantic to our thoughts of the moment, a mere extension of what we are already feeling.

I believe that the experience of art is essentially an epiphany. It reveals some strange, sometimes incomprehensible, hitherto unconsidered (or even actively rejected) impression, with a force that mere words cannot replicate. It says to us, ‘I know you were just now thinking X, but have you considered, also/to the contrary, that the universe is horrifyingly vast? That April, and not the bitterly cold winter months that precede it, is the most cruel month of the year? That, although you think yourself helplessly conquered by a hostile world, you will win, like Prince Calaf screaming “Vincero!” into the night?’ If art is indeed an epiphany, it is no wonder that the curated playlist represents a deviation from what art is in essence. How can you curate for yourself an epiphany?

You might be asking at this point: who cares? Who cares if my relation to my music has been corrupted from what it might have been like in the past? It makes my walks to class melancholy, jubilant, hateful, hopeful…and so always pleasurable. At the end of the day, that’s why I listen to songs, not to get at some revelatory truth hiding in their lyrics and chords. 

To that I answer: it creates a dangerous and circular solipsism. It obediently convinces you, deceptively borrowing the original virtue of art, that there is some higher and absolute Truth to your current mood, even though the song was contingently chosen to reflect your mood in the first place. It reduplicates it from outside and gives it validation, all with a fickle but extremely powerful force that helps your momentary impulses swallow your better sense of the world around you. 

And that leads me to my final criticism of the AirPod. In making the music subservient to one’s internal state of mind, it not only cheapens one’s relation to the music playing in the ear, it also severs one’s relation to the world around us. James Joyce famously weaves all of his short stories in The Dubliners around moments of “epiphany,” sudden, ineffable spiritual inspirations that occur when the characters notice some peculiar detail in the scenes of Dublin around them. Never some loud explosion or shout, always subtle and indirect: the silence of the bazaar, the darkness of the sky, the mortal nature of falling snow. As I wander around New York, alone and in silence, I cannot help but agree with that sentiment; and for me, as you might have guessed, that means that the world is art.

Here I want to leave behind the theory and offer a sort of epiphany that came to me recently. On a very recent Sunday morning, strolling down Amsterdam Avenue and relishing a beautiful spring day, I suddenly heard a middle-aged woman weeping on the steps before the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. She was properly distraught. But so beautiful and warm were the slanting sunlight rays descending on her, and so impressed were the flocking tourists, only a few short feet away, by the grandeur of the Cathedral! I don’t know quite what it was that I took away from this scene, but it lingered with me for a few minutes, at least, and has been returning sporadically since. But would I even have noticed anything at all, had I been vibing to, say, “Sunday Best” by Surfaces, selfishly trying to reduplicate the simple spring joy that I had already been feeling? 

Or, perhaps consider this other hypothetical: imagine that you are walking back from a brutal day, listening to “Creep” by Radiohead, wallowing in loneliness and contemplating the worst. All the eyes that pass by you, if only in accordance with the artistic impression that you yourself have imposed on yourself, tell you that yes, you’re a creep, yes, you’re a weirdo, and yes, there is something the hell with your being here. But what if, unbeknownst to you, a friend had called your name from across the street, with a kind of literary affability that could have convinced you, with a force akin to that of art, that you are very much not alone? Wouldn’t that be real art, a simple greeting that comes to you like a miracle at the most necessary time? Quit dreaming, you say, quit poeticizing. But in fact that wasn’t a hypothetical at all, that really did happen to me, and I really would have ignored this friend if he hadn’t, in a doubly art-like act, waved hysterically at me to catch my distracted attention. 

There is music all around, art all around, epiphanies all around: in the chirping of birds, in the weeping of a stranger, in the greeting of a friend, and most of all, in the silences that come between. One needs only listen.

I’d like to conclude this little essay with a little thought. It’s not fully developed, but I’d like to leave it that way. Walking around campus and the city, forced to listen to real things, I have often found myself singing out loud. Often what I sing are songs pulled deep from my childhood, lyrics that I did not even remember that I remembered; so arbitrary is this singing. Of course, this phenomenon could simply be a withdrawal symptom in response to my former addiction to the AirPod, or a sign of excruciating boredom.

But could it be something else?