When there is a need for solitude, peace and quiet, some resort to earmuffs. Although good for cutting off or reducing the loudest of noises in your neighborhood, earmuffs cannot help you to hear the sounds of the world to your liking – either you hear nothing or you hear it all – there is no in-between.
Now Doppler Labs has an ear bud that allows you to choose how you would like to hear the sounds surrounding you – with a volume knob. The ear buds are no hearing aids and neither are they a pair of headphones. Once paired to the iPhone, you have a way to customize your hearing. You turn a volume control up or down until the sounds of the ever-louder world match your liking.
Wearing the Doppler ear buds can make your commute a little easier or make the concert sound as good in section 220 as in row 1. Doppler is presenting a long-term vision of its “hearables” technology that it expects everyone will eventually use in their ears, throughout the day.
According to Doppler, the world is becoming louder by the day. However, the ear buds control what you allow into your ears. You have a volume control and an equalizer for your ears. Control the loudness of the sounds you hear, crank up the bass or even mute sounds selectively, if you do not want to hear something – a baby crying, the screech of the subway, anything. As Fritz Lanman, the executive director of Doppler expresses, it is amazing what a volume control in your ear can do.
Doppler’s companion app on the iPhone has a dial graduated in decibels. Spin it in one direction to increase the loudness and reduce everything to a whisper by spinning it back the other way. The Effects section has buttons to help you choose the ambience. You can make sounds echo several times or you can choose a reverberation just as you were on stage in Carnegie Hall.
In fact, the Doppler companion app helps you to add many effects to sound entering your ears. There is provision for mixing different frequencies. You can make the songs flange, echo or add fuzz. The integrated noise-cancellation allows turning off most sounds – there is a special Baby Suppress button. Doppler has designed this morbid-sounding mode for muting the sound of crying babies.
This is not the first time people have attempted to augment hearing as something beyond hearing aids. A hundred years ago, the inventor of the first headphones, Nathaniel Baldwin made it as an amplifier and suppressor. Others have done considerable research on this subject.
Doppler has turned all this research into something you can wear. However, nobody likes to wear hearing aids, and Doppler thinks the key to making their ear buds acceptable to people is by making it absolutely clear what these things can and cannot do. According to Doppler, the ear buds are a niche product, mostly for music lovers, allowing them to tweak a concert to their liking. They are not for 24-hour wearing and not for making phone calls.
