Passive audio: Is it time for a new user experience?

Your loud is becoming my loud. Images from Shutterstock; illustration by Rishad Patel, Splice

If you’re anything like me, you’ve noticed a shift in our public audio environment. There are people talking on phones. There’s music. You can hear entertainment audio.

Things have gotten loud.

But it’s a different loud. We’re not talking about kids with squeaky audio-forward footwear. This isn’t about airport announcements or that construction project next door or traffic or dogs playing or babies barking.

I’m talking about the shift that private audio is making to the public space.

It’s a whole new loud. It’s that your loud is becoming my loud. It’s that you’re sharing your loud with me…and I didn’t opt in.

Passive audio is the new passive smoking

Remember passive smoking? I’m calling this passive audio.

Until not very long ago, smoking was something you could do wherever you liked — and you never really had to check with me if I minded. (I minded.) And then slowly the walls closed in on you and suddenly you had to move to the back of the plane, or sit in the smoking section of the restaurant, or go stand in the yellow smoking box. And now you can’t even do that because there are fewer and fewer places for you to smoke. It isn’t socially acceptable, and it went from there to being illegal.

It was worrying when smoking was socially acceptable, not only because it was really, really bad for you but because it was really, really bad for the people you were smoking next to. Passive smoking became our new line of defence. And that’s what shut down public smoking — even in the face of Big Tobacco.

With audio, though, it wasn’t always like this. I mean, over the years we’ve talked about decibel levels — and acceptable decibel levels. We’ve all asked the neighbours to turn it down. We’ve Googled stuff like “loud music law singapore”. We’ve shushed people who didn’t put their phones on Silent mode at the theatre. Our tech now even has hearing protection checks around headphone levels. We knew that noise pollution was bad for our health but we didn’t always know what to do about it. Much of that concern was mostly around unintentional noise. Things got loud and we didn’t really notice — until we did.

This is a different problem. It isn’t about volume any more. The battle is being fought on a front that is unlike any other we’ve fought before, and it is this: what should be your private audio is now my public noise.

It mostly has to do with devices.

You’re sitting next to me video-chatting with your bro on speaker mode at the airport gate. You’re playing your video game on full death match mode while we wait at the dentist’s. You were even somewhat endearingly walking down the nightlife street with a few of your friends with beers, chips, and your Spotify house mix on for all to hear — your own little porta-party. Your kid is watching their parent-sanctioned YouTuber on full American while we eat tiny food on giant plates in this fancy restaurant. You’re having a yelly conversation into your phone held horizontally in front of your face even as you walk through the mall.

And the problem isn't that you’re doing these doubtlessly enjoyable things. It’s that you’ve assumed that I want to do them with you. And it’s that you’ve left out that one vital thing that separates your audio from me: your earphones.

What is it about device audio that makes it a little less bearable than just regular noise? It isn’t the volume that gets to us. It may not even be the frequency. It’s the fact that it's there at all.

So how do I opt out?

If I want to unsubscribe from your audio, what’s a socially acceptable user experience for both of us?

Because the problem is not just that personal audio is spilling into the public space; the problem is that it feels like it’s slowly becoming socially acceptable to have someone else’s audio leaking into your life. The few times I’ve objected to it, I’ve gotten compliance but it’s mostly mildly confused (“How odd is this man making earphone gestures at me that he wants me to turn down my talk show — okay whatever lol!”).

It used to be the other way around. When Sony launched their Walkman almost exactly forty-three years ago in 1979, the idea of a private audio experience — in public — felt like the death of society to some. “This personalised silo, intimate consumption of media was going to end communities, if not society as we knew it.” This was the era where we all suffered boomboxes and people’s radios where you knew the score whether you liked it or not. We suffered, but we suffered collectively. The Walkman broke the social rules of the time in a pretty drastic way. “It’s like a drug: You put the Walkman on and you blot out the rest of the world.”

And now we don’t want collective audio suffering any more. I don’t want to blot out the world so much as blot out yours when it leaks into mine.

Designing the collective audio user experience

So what do we do with passive audio? I mean, it’s hardly likely that it’s giving us cancer. Should we make a case for personal space that extends also to the audio space around our persons? Is it that these daily audio incursions into our attention sphere are affecting our mental health? Should we be working on a Right to Silence act?

Or is this a little social something we can just sort out between ourselves without resorting to the legal paraphernalia of the state or the medical establishment that is already so besieged? Is there a way for us to not just play nice, but to care for each other in better ways?

Where are the contextual lines here? Are there cultures around the world that are more or less tolerant of private audio streams taking over the public domain? Are you underestimating how intrusive your audio is on other peoples peace or are you just being an asshole and you don’t care either way? Where is the friction?

Sometimes friction is necessary. I was in Lisbon recently and I met a elderly man who lived right above a public square where tourists gathered to eat, drink, and listen to street musicians who were often electronically amplified. When the noise became unbearable, he would gleefully turn on his gigantic speaker that lived in his living room window — facing streetwards. His aggressive party mixes would flood the square, drown out the original music, and chaos would ensue.

In the audio wars between the private and the public, you can’t hear yourself win or lose.

How do we navigate this space together? Who is intruding on whom? Could we perhaps work out a system in which we agree that it’s you that’s being intrusive by spilling your audio into my world and not me for politely asking you to turn it down. I mean, this guy’s solution is to give out “cheap Chinese earbuds” — and also “Vulcan Neck Pinch you and your kids”, which is slightly more drastic than my strategy, which is along the lines of: sorry but would you mind *makes earphone sign with a passively aggressive smile to sugarcoat it slightly*?

I have taken to spending an inordinate amount of time in airports. A couple of days ago, I was by myself in a waiting area with lots of other people, and when one man began broadcasting his video soundtrack from his phone for all to hear at top volume, we were all aghast. Our eyes met. Our collective eyes rolled. Heads were shaking, shoulders were shrugging — the universal language of frustration was in motion. It got louder. I decided to take charge and, with the biggest smile on my face, asked the oblivious offender very politely if it was possible at all that he could listen on earphones. He agreed, smiled back, and all was well. I resumed my place among my fellow passengers-in-waiting, and there were discreet thumbs up and back slaps all round. An hour later, my flight was cancelled and I returned to the same insanely crowded area to welcoming “Hello!”s from my new friends — a chair appeared for me magically, and a camaraderie formed. We had suffered — and conquered — together. There is a use case and an opportunity here.

Device-first or social-first?

But maybe you and I need a little more help that goes beyond the social compact. If our devices are the playing field, then it’s in their usage that the intervention needs to happen.

Perhaps what we’re really looking for here is a well designed user experience for this new social friction. It’s been done before. Tristan Harris created awareness and a new social vocabulary around time spent and screen time. Twitter asks if you want to read the story before retweeting, or if you’d like to reconsider tweeting something offensive. What if apps — video, chat, game, music — had little social cues reminding you to use headphones if they’re not detected?

“You don’t appear to have earphones connected. Are you sure you want speaker mode on?”

What if your device audio settings had an inside-voice mode?

Or…hear me out… imagine if our devices had no speaker mode at all? That the only way you could listen to stuff, apart from headlines and earphones, was through a Bluetooth or wired speaker accessory?

It’s clear that we need to design more levels of friction to the entire user experience — because it’s not just that the experience has changed.

It’s that the user has changed in a very profound way. We’ve gone from being one user per device to many — whether we like it or not. We may as well design for that use case.

Until then, the only alternative we have is to go back to that future in 1979 and do what the Walkman promised: just put on our own earphones and “blot out the rest of the world”.