Earplugs are fantastic: wireless versions are especially convenient to use, because you can use them flexibly. It gives you complete freedom of movement, you can turn off noise and there’s great audio quality too if you make the right choice. But of course it can always be better. At TechGirl we love constructive criticism. And we like to think out-of-the-box. So voilà, here are three tips from TechGirl Laura-Jenny: this is how earplugs can be better for women.
1. The shape
I had it again recently. I put my earbuds in my ears, but the clip-like shape keeps my hair getting stuck in them. This is simply not convenient. I’ve said it before about earplugs. Yet major brands still produce ones that I launch everywhere thanks to my hair. It is very impractical and, especially for such small gadgets, it means that we lose them more easily: they end up between the tracks when boarding the train, for example.
2. Earbuds with sing-along mode
There should be a sing-along mode. You know, the image from movies where someone turns on music and dances around the room in their underwear and sings along loudly to the music. Of course with a brush in hand as a microphone. However, many earbuds have a setting where the music stops as soon as you start talking or move your jaw. Although this is very useful when a colleague asks something or when you want to order coffee, it is less useful if you want to sing along loudly as soon as you get home and close the door behind you. It would be nice if there was a button or touch option that allowed you to instantly enable sing-along mode. Then the music starts at a preset volume and does not switch off when you move your mouth. Woohoo!
3. A woman mode
This sounds strange, but women and men appear to hear audio differently. In any case, the processing is different: in women, the two hemispheres of the brain light up when processing sound, while men only use one. Men also have more gray matter, while women have much more white matter. However, the biggest difference between the two is the frequency. Although men are more likely to suffer hearing damage, women benefit from a frequency above 2,000 Hertz: they hear better. Women have more difficulty with low tones, such as frequencies between 1,000 and 2,000 Hertz. It would be great if the makers of earbuds come up with a women’s mode to see if music can be displayed differently so that we can listen to it even better. Those low tones, something can be done about it, perhaps already in music mixing: who knows how different music would sound if we heard it the way men probably hear it too?
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