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One Per Cent: A New Scientist Blog

Earphones that know when they're in the wrong ear

Jacob Aron, technology reporter

rexfeatures_831280a.jpg(Image: OJO Images/Rex Features)




These new earphones also solve another common listening problem - sharing your 'phones with a friend, which - as anyone who has listened to just one half of a Beatles song (or any other track with hard audio panning) knows - isn't the most satisfying musical experience.

When worn by a single user the Universal Earphones run a weak electrical current from one side to the other, but this connection is broken if the earphones are shared between two users, causing each speaker to play both left and right channels through at once.

The researchers will present their work at Intelligent User Interface conference in Lisbon, Portugal later this month, but they also have further plans for improving ordinary earphones, including skin conductance sensors that detect whether the earphones are actually in your ear, which would let them automatically pause or resume your music on removal or insertion.

The shared-use detection could also pipe entirely different tracks to each user, letting two people use one audio player to listen to their own music.

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But I actually prefer to have my earphones in the "wrong" ear. And it turns out that out not only are our ears not identical in their frequency response -- but also that the "standard" left-right arrangement is backwards to our physiology.

So as far as I'm concerned, this "improvement" would actually be an anti-feature.


Some people I think are just wired differently and might actually prefer to hear it in the "wrong" ear. I suppose they wouldn't find these earphones entirely useful, but a novel concept.

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