new perspective

So my old headphones gave out and I'm using the cell-phone headphones instead.

This has created a strange, and interesting, difference in the perception of music.

A lot of the trippier stuff (your Strawberry Fields, your Pink Floyds) sounds vastly distorted - the vocals are pushed into the background, like they're singing across a huge auditorium and you can only hear the echoes. (Ha, a pun on a Pink Floyd epic). The instruments on the other hand are pushed into the foreground - this is all culminating in a very different experience.

For the heavier stuff, the bass is pushed almost out of the picture - again creating an interesting dynamic, because it is with the heavier stuff that a bass sounds good. The vocals are completely gone (for some bands e.g. Lamb of God, this is a good thing for me), instead all I can hear are the drums, keyboards and the guitars - but the guitars! The sound is so alive I can almost feel the guitar, I'm almost afraid to play a Hendrix song..! It's like putting your head right next to the amplifier to the virtual exclusion of everything else.

I'm also getting a completely different reading of the songs themselves. Did Jimmy Page really just do that? Keyboards are actually sounding like they belong in "Trampled under Foot"! People, you have no idea how good Iron Maiden are sounding. Three guitars and I can hear them clear as crystal. I can even make out without effort, the scraping of the pick on the strings.

Funny, when you think of it. The actual song itself does not change, neither the person listening, simply the medium has shifted, and an alternate understanding emerges. Mystical.

The earphones are for Nokia's XpressMusic line of phones. The laptop I'm using is an IBM, sorry, lenovo, T61.