Hoodie speakers keep open lines of communication
Tim Dubitsky's hood.e garment has speakers unobtrusively sewn into the hood, making it possible for the wearer to listen to music without shutting herself off from the world. These are unpowered speakers, one hopes, making it possible to remove them for the dry cleaners. The thought of using these to inflict a little noise on others—so they may enjoy the thrill of outrage, of course!—has its charms.
Can you not see young w1n5t0n in this?
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Not sure how to feel about this. Here in Munich, there has been a recent(?) phenomenon where teenagers will crank out tunes on their phones hung from a lanyard (oddly, it seems at least 75% of these people are Turkish) I understand the need to jam while walking around, but the sound is just awful, obviously. The Mediterranean disco/techno/crap-pop exponentially complicates the auditory suck-factor. Geriatric Germans just love it.
Now with this Hoodie, I get to hear this music louder, but at least in stereo.
I would totally wear one of these. I just don't think I would crank the jam when I was near other people.
It's the same in London. Nobody challenges the teenagers who do this, on the off-chance that they are carrying knives and consider such a challenge to be "disrespec'". So whenever you board the top deck of a bus, chances are there's a posse of young thugs marking their territory with gangsta rap blaring tinnily out of their mobile phones.
I recall a recent incident on a tram in Nottingham where a young man who would have been described in the local newspaper as a 'youth' was playing dreadful music through the dreadful speaker on his mobile phone rather loudly on a crowded rush hour tram at around five pm. A woman asked him very politely if he could turn it down please as it was disturbing other people (we were all exchanging dark looks) and he started shouting and yelling about how nobody can tell him what to do, it's his city, why do they make mobile phones with speakers if it's not to listen to his tunes on, etc. etc.
He didn't seem to comprehend the argument that other people don't actually like listening to bad music through an even worse sound reproduction system. Is it just me, or is there a group of people about five to ten years younger than me growing up with absolutely no concept of decent sound reproduction?
Pitching my hat in with the grumpy old men, I'm sick of this sort of thing too. Seriously, I have a £10 pair of headphones that sound great.
I did once actually ask a guy on a bus to turn his (terrible and tinny) music down or at least switch to headphones. He gave me a 5 minute angry rant about how a bus is a public space so he can do whatever he f'ing wants. Also that we, the other passengers, had no right to ask him to stop.
I tried pointing out that if he has the right to listen to music then we had the right not to, but I'm not sure he heard it much less thought about it.
I've always wanted to know whether
a) it genuinely doesn't occur to a given kid that their music irritates almost everyone subjected to it
b) They know but don't care
c) They know and love it
Like most other antisocial behaviour, it's not the behaviour itself that gets to me so much as the fact that I just can't wrap my head around the thought process behind it.
I think the solution to this is to carry a device than can play out of one tinny mono speaker, but has been jacked to play it really loud. Gut a phone, leave the power and the speaker, hook a iPod shuffle to it, and load that shuffle with the worst music possible. Better to have a good selection of bad music, as you never know if you might be playing the same bad genre as your hearing on the Tube, or S-bahn or subway. Damn, I hope to hell I have not become a grumpy old man. Epiphany. I need to change my ways.
I've often considered snagging a few of those high frequency ringtone/mp3's to play on my phone just as a countermeasure. I'm in my late 20's and can still hear it fairly well, but it should annoy the person who is trying to listen to the tinny death metal rattling from hanging earbuds.