Is Noise Cancelled?

Sometimes, I avoid trying new things because I worry I’ll like them too much. I’ve never tried ecstacy, for example. I think I would love ecstasy. I’ve never smoked a cigarette, despite recurring vivid dreams in which I am smoking a cigarette and it feels fantastic. Noise canceling headphones have always been, for some reason, counted among these things like a habit-forming narcotic. Despite the ubiquity of noise canceling technology, and the many use cases for it in my own life as a New Yorker and frequent flier, I resisted Bose’s siren song for many years.

This past October, sitting in row six million on a full flight from JFK to Paris, something inside me snapped. As two parents argued bitterly over the screams of their miserable children for the full duration of a two hour delay on the tarmac, and I sat by helplessly with a pair of cheap wired earpods stuffed into my ear canals, I resolved to invest in noise canceling headphones. This beleaguered family was the Final Boss of in-flight disturbances, sent by Big Noise Canceling to convince me of my need for their product.

When I got back to New York, I purchased (on a payment plan, of course) a pair of Apple AirPod Max’s for a cool $550. I recently told a friend over lunch how much they cost and she almost choked on her chopped salad. I shrugged. A small price to pay for peace.

I’ll be honest, my first thirty minutes of noise canceling felt bizarre. I thought, oh no, I hate this. The sensation made me nauseous. The impact of my footsteps felt… internal. All you can hear really, aside from the audio being piped in from your iPhone, are the sounds of your body. It’s an intimate, strange auditory shift.

There is a little button atop the AirPod Max that turns on the “transparency” effect, which un-cancels the noise by amplifying it from an external microphone into your ears. It’s a very good sell for the noise canceling mode, because it makes the sounds outside of your little pods even louder and more disruptive to your now-coddled ears.

My contract with myself when I purchased the AirPods was that I would only wear them when I was sitting down or at home. They could be worn while working at my office or on a flight. They could not be worn walking around the city or on the subway, mostly for safety reasons. My street smarts, even as a humble North Carolinian, have been sharpened by seven years in New York City. It just seems really fucking stupid to walk around with giant, visible noise-canceling headphones on. Like a welcoming beacon to any would-be thieves or attackers that you couldn’t hear them approaching.

And yet, my AirPods beckoned me every time I left the house. I could listen to my shitty wired earpods that let every outside sound in alongside my music, or I could float around in my own little movie with crystal clear audio. I started granting myself allowances. I could wear them if I was walking somewhere in my own neighborhood during the daytime. I could wear them when I went to my weekly volunteer slot on Wednesdays, as a treat. The slippery slope of convenience and comfort carried me to a place I didn’t like: a state of complacency and detachment.

The term “noise pollution” entered my vocabulary in the last year or so. The first time I heard it was in the The New York Times, in a piece about how Williamsburg residents were furious about the racket—no pun intended—from nearby pickleball courts. Constant thwacking from sun up to sun down. I began applying this new-to-me jargon liberally, labeling any sound I had not instigated as “noise pollution.” A friend calling me when I did not want to be disturbed: noise pollution. An ambulance’s warning siren whooshing down my street: noise pollution. My roommate scraping a spoon repeatedly against a bowl (AKA eating): noise pollution. And the antidote to noise pollution was clapping on my gigantic, sleek Apple AirPods and pretending that I was the only person on the planet.

I have it on good authority (Instagram gossip queen Deux Moi) that Leonardo DiCaprio wears headphones during sex. This feels like the ultimate example of what’s at stake if we become too sensitive to noise, too obsessed with controlling the volume of our own lives — one of the most raw, intimate experiences you can have with another person, muted and dubbed over.

But I understand why Leo might want to soundtrack his sexual encounters. I have always deeply appreciated music and its function as a protective layer over everything, a sonic filter that makes life more palatable. Music helped me to escape a life I felt misaligned with and trapped in as a child. With the advent of Walkmans and then iPods, I was able to spend most of my waking hours lulled by a soundtrack of music that echoed my mood and who I felt I was at my core, rather than who I needed to be to survive my adolescence.

I’m not a kid anymore, stuck in the Bible Belt, longing for the New York City I saw in movies. I made this life for myself, and I love it. I want to live in it, even when it’s hard. I want to smell it, even when it stinks. I want to see it, even when it’s ugly. And I want to hear it, even when it’s loud as all hell, as my city tends to be.

In a recent interview with The Creative Independent, musician, writer, etc. Carrie Brownstein said: “If I’m too much in my own head, I feel like I’m sort of nowhere, that I’m almost overly curating my experience. If I just have headphones in and I go into a store, it’s like, ‘Well, I could just be anywhere because I’m sort of dismissing the environment.’ So I try not to put headphones in.”

Not wanting to “dismiss my environment," I’ve been experimenting with not wearing headphones. It’s not unlike my sobriety, actually. Stripping away modifiers in an attempt to experience life unfiltered. Without the sound shroud of my headphones, I can hear friends shouting “I love you” to one another as they part ways, the warmth lingering in the air behind them. Dogs pant and click beside their owners, tags jingling. There’s something so sweet about the sound of dog tags, the names, the numbers there. I hear children calling after one another as they race up and down the sidewalk, and it makes me think about what it was like to play as a child, a happy and uncomplicated time. I hear arguments, blurts of TikToks, incessant honking, noisy teenagers, noisy adults. Skateboards rolling fast across pavement. Car alarms and construction clatter. Neighbors greeting each other.

Without my headphones in, I talk to other people more: the older woman I walk past on my way to get coffee, the stranger I play an awkward sidewalk shuffle with, the FedEx guy. Somehow with all this noise, the world still feels calmer. By accepting my environment, rather than dismissing it, I feel like a part of something. I don’t hover around in my own bubble, my feet meet the earth, and I can be present here.