Nico - Induction of Sonic Distance

Active Noise Cancelling (ANC) headphones present an example of a sonic interface that isolates the user into a preestablished sonic profile. Nevertheless, their digital manipulation of sonic environments constitutes an affront to the perception of sonic distance. Noise reduction algorithms induce a sonic distance, a parallel perception of reality, contingent to the biases imposed by the algorithm. ANC headphones employ a miniature microphone to capture, process and reproduce surrounding soundscapes. The result comprises the “desired signal” (e.g. music, speech) and the environmental information in its negative (denoised) form.

Cécile Malaspina proposes a reconceptualization of noise from a quantitative measure of information in relation to noise to a qualitative measure of sound, where the first measures a relation of probability, while the latter considers an object of perception. As disturbance of transmission, noise is an act of violence and disruption manifested in interruption and disconnection. As a perceptual phenomenon, noise is socially constructed and situated in hierarchies of race, class, age, and gender and is often coded as othered sound. ANC headphones have the potential to reconfigure noise’s socially constructed demarcations as sensorial experiences. Yet, the compulsory modification of quotidian sounds that are perceived as noise becomes itself an act of violence and disruption. 

In audio technology, noise manifests as unwanted signals generated within a system, which could appear by means of electromagnetic induction, a changing magnetic field generates an electrical current. Based on this principle, microphones and speakers transduce energy, from acoustic to electrical and vice versa. For Gilbert Simondon, induction is a unidirectional process that generates plausible realities derived from individual observations and totalizing generalizations and therefore cannot content with heterogeneity. Conversely, transduction provides the basis for an explorative form of thought which is not necessarily teleological or linear, and which allows for reconfigurations of new structures without loss or reduction. Listening as an exploratory activity is then a fundamental transductive act: a process of intuition and individuation that “discovers and generates the heard.”

The unidirectional inductive process takes place in the transformation of environmental sound into a re-production of a sonic generalization, implying a loss of information in the listening act. The acoustic outcome is pre-predetermined by the previous observations of the embedded algorithm, and it is therefore contaminated with the implicit biases of its inductive functioning. The creation of a new signal presented as a re-creation of virtual sonic environments invisibilizes not only the medium, but also the content itself, thus creating a perceptual absence an an-aesthesia, a deaf trust in the algorithm’s definition of noise, which is not accessible by the subject’s perception.

The transductive exploration of the listening act itself is violently removed from agency of the listener, interrupting a process of individuation by acoustically isolating and socially alienating the individual. Instead of negating its surroundings by passively masking it acoustic content, ANC induce sonic distance not despite their active awareness of its surroundings, but because of it. The strategies through which ANC headphones are marketed, position them in a social dynamic of othering through sonic distancing between the listener and othered profiles of the soundscape's sonic agents. The promise of soothing experience is only archived by the simultaneous imposition of algorithmic mediation, which replaces exploratory listening with synthetic experience, thus alienating the individual from its embodied sensorial experiences.