A Survey on the Affordances of “Hearables” <s> Headphones <s> The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena organized as "sound" and "not sound." In The Audible Past, this history crisscrosses the liminal regions between bodies and machines, originals and copies, nature and culture, and life and death. ::: ::: Blending cultural studies and the history of communication technology, Sterne follows modern sound technologies back through a historical labyrinth. Along the way, he encounters capitalists and inventors, musicians and philosophers, embalmers and grave robbers, doctors and patients, deaf children and their teachers, professionals and hobbyists, folklorists and tribal singers. The Audible Past tracks the connections between the history of sound and the defining features of modernity: from developments in medicine, physics, and philosophy to the tumultuous shifts of industrial capitalism, colonialism, urbanization, modern technology, and the rise of a new middle class. ::: ::: A provocative history of sound, The Audible Past challenges theoretical commonplaces such as the philosophical privilege of the speaking subject, the visual bias in theories of modernity, and static descriptions of nature. It will interest those in cultural studies, media and communication studies, the new musicology, and the history of technology. <s> BIB001 </s> A Survey on the Affordances of “Hearables” <s> Headphones <s> Working from a phenomenological position, the author investigates "in-head" acoustic localization in the context of the historical development of modern listening. Starting from the development of the stethoscope in the early 19th century, he traces novel techniques for generating space within the body and extrapolates from them into contemporary uses of headphones in sound art. The first half of the essay explores the history, techniques and technology of "in-head" acoustics; the second half presents three sound artists who creatively generate headphone spatializations. The essay ends with reflections on how these sound "imaging" techniques topologically shape our subjectivities. <s> BIB002 </s> A Survey on the Affordances of “Hearables” <s> Headphones <s> Electrical hearing aids were the principal site for component miniaturization and compact assembly before World War II. After the war, hearing aid users became the first consumer market for printed circuits, transistors, and integrated circuits. Due to the stigmatization of hearing loss, users generally demanded small or invisible devices. In addition to being early adopters, deaf and hard of hearing people were often the inventors, retailers, and manufacturers of miniaturized electronics. <s> BIB003 </s> A Survey on the Affordances of “Hearables” <s> Headphones <s> Over the last thirty-five years, headphones have been linked to a range of worrisome listening trends: from ostensibly encouraging antisocial behaviour, to putting listeners at risk of permanent hearing loss, to increasing otherwise avoidable pedestrian injuries and deaths. Efforts to address these issues have typically fallen into one of two categories. One approach has been to lobby for the strict regulation or banning of headphones in environments where they might pose a heightened risk. A second approach has been to advocate better public education on the potential dangers involved. Yet ::: neither approach — blaming technology or blaming behaviour — has been particularly effective in developing long-term solutions to these problems. According to recent studies, instances of headphone-relating hearing loss and pedestrian accidents continue to be on the rise, and the cultural stereotype of headphone listening as a quintessentially “antisocial” listening practice remains as strong as ever. ::: Drawing on Peter-Paul Verbeek’s (2005; 2006; 2011) post-humanist moral philosophy of technology, this dissertation develops a different framework: namely, a design-oriented approach to what ::: I call “the moral problem of headphones.” My premise is that in order to address the problem of headphones in a meaningful way we must begin, not by isolating technology or behaviour and treating them as underlying “causes,” but by forging a deeper understanding of how headphone-related devices, listening strategies, and moral values are mutually shaped. By examining three historical moments in which headphones took on clear moral significance — (1) the introduction of broadcast radio in the 1920s, (2) the proliferation of television and hi-fi in the 1950s and 1960s, and (3) the rise of the ::: “personal stereo” in the early 1980s — this thesis demonstrates that headphone-related technologies, listening practices, and moralities are not immutable but have changed over time. It does so in service of a greater argument that our ability to make headphone listening safer and more responsible depends not on our ability to commit more strongly to, or oscillate more freely between, “bad technology” and “bad behaviour” perspectives, but to better engineer good headphone–listener “relations” through smarter moral design. <s> BIB004
The precursor to audio headphones is often considered to be the medical stethoscope, a tool designed to isolate biological sound information BIB002 . Early hearing aids, some of which were purely mechanical devices, have also been considered to be precursors to audio headphones BIB003 . The early history of audio headphones can largely be situated within the radio and telecom industries BIB001 . First generation radio operators working in close physical proximity to one another required isolated  The precursor to audio headphones is often considered to be the medical stethoscope, a tool designed to isolate biological sound information BIB002 . Early hearing aids, some of which were purely mechanical devices, have also been considered to be precursors to audio headphones BIB003 . The early history of audio headphones can largely be situated within the radio and telecom industries BIB001 . First generation radio operators working in close physical proximity to one another required isolated presentations of audio information, and thus a number of headphone designs appeared between 1900 and 1920 BIB001  . Headphones not only facilitated isolated audio presentations, but by the mid-1920s, they were also employed for personal enjoyment to create a continuous zone of personalized space while listening to radio programming or phonograph records BIB001  . Headphones have evolved in many ways since the 1920s, and features such as sound quality, design, and cost have made vast improvements. Whereas early teleoperator headsets were designed to optimize speech perception, today's headphones are typically optimized for music and multimedia. Prior to the rise of mobile audio devices in the 1980s, headphones for personal listening could afford to be heavy or awkward looking, as their use was constrained to a tethered sound source  . Thereafter, the visual appearance of headphones became more important, not only for facilitating a number of application specific designs (such as aviation headsets, disc jockey headsets, etc.) but also for projecting fashionability and social-status BIB004 . Summary: Headphones afford the isolated presentation of audio, which has evolved from an affordance of private listening to an affordance of defining private space.