Listening to music through earbuds tends to favor treble over bass and this has social consequences:

“At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, with the possibilities for high-fidelity recording at a democratized high and ‘bass culture’ more globally present than ever, we face the irony that people are listening to music, with increasing frequency if not ubiquity, primarily through small plastic speakers—most often via cellphones but also, commonly, laptop computers and leaky earbuds. This return to ‘treble culture,’ recalling the days of transistor radios or even gramophones and scratchy 78s, rep- resents a techno-historical outcome of varying significance for different practitioners and observers, the everyday inevitability of ‘tinny’ transmissions appearing to affirm a preference for convenience, portability, and publicity, even as a variety of critical listeners express anxiety about what might be lost along with frequencies that go unheard (and, in the case of bass, unfelt). From cognitive and psychological studies seeking to determine listeners’ abilities to distinguish between different MP3 bitrates to audiophiles and ‘bass boosters’ of all sorts lamenting not only missing frequencies but also the ontological implications thereof to commuters complaining about noisy broadcasts on public transport, there has already been a great deal of ink spilled over today’s trebly soundscapes.”

And the concluding lines from the full chapter:

As mobile devices, especially phones, make sound reproduction—however trebly—more commonplace and perhaps more social than ever before (hotly contested as that sociality or sociability may be), we can only wonder about, as we try to take stock of, the effects on listening as a private and a (counter?) public activity, not to mention the implications thereof (Warner 2002).

Imagining unheard bass calls attention to the active possibilities in treble culture. And indeed, as perhaps my own narrative offers, a lot of the dyads through which the public debate plays out—active versus passive, progressive versus regressive, public versus private, sociable versus individualistic—might be easily enough flipped depending on one’s perspective. This reconcilability suggests that treble culture, especially in its contemporary form, offers what writer and artist Jace Clayton (aka DJ /Rupture) calls a “strategy for intimacy with the digital” (2009). In the ongoing dance between people and technology, treble culture opens a space where imaginary bass can move us as much as tinny blasts of noise. As participants in today’s treble culture attest, the MP3 may play its listener, but people imagine a lot more than missing bits when they listen. Ironically, the techno-historical convergence that Gilroy mourns, in which “community and solidarity, momentarily constituted in the very process, in the act of interpretation itself ” (2003:388)—a lament which issues also from the anxious discourse around today’s treble culture—may yet find some resuscitation thanks to trebly audio technologies. For what do such acts of interpretation require if not listening together? And isn’t listening, perhaps more now and more collectively and publicly than ever, what treble culture is all about?

This seems to be an interesting counterargument to those who argue earbuds ruin public spaces because everyone is off in their own worlds. This may be temporarily true as one is listening – and it seems to be even more prevalent on college campuses, though I remember doing this with my own Walkman or Discman during college – but Marshall is talking about broader music culture and the sociability it fosters. People could be brought together by their trebly experiences as basically everyone with a smartphone can carry thousands of songs, if not access millions of songs through streaming services, from everywhere.

Another thought: the Beats headphones have been quite popular even with higher price tags. Is this due to an ongoing battle between treble and bass culture?