The trendy hearable gets a soundcheck in Brooklyn
Dog cafes, vegan brunches, beard oil? No, the Here Sound Experience at National Sawdust in Williamsburg is probably the most Brooklyn thing ever.
Doppler Labs, which successfully Kickstarted its Here Active Listening earbuds this summer, invited journos and industry types to remix a live show of violinists and jazz pianists with its new hearable last week.
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It’s a sign that Doppler Labs sees the wireless earbuds, which feature a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) and can change the volume and add effects to real world sounds, as an accessory they could pitch to music fans. As well as bass boost, reverb, flange and echo effects in the app, users can also save presets for equaliser settings (Carnegie Hall, Abbey Road).
From a couple of reports, we also got a few more details on how it works. Only two settings can be used at once and it seems to create a kind of silent disco type vibe as members of the audience realise they are listening to slightly different music to the people next to them.
We’ve talked about the similarity to LJ Rich’s glitching experiments before but the more we think about it, the closer the similarity with VR is too. In both cases, the audience (viewer/listener/player) is given more control over how they experience the game or movie or live performance. Are we ready for it? Are we just going to ruin a gig by fiddling about with sliders and settings? It’s a bit too soon to tell.
Doppler Labs is limiting Here to 10,000 units, going to 2,800 Kickstarter backers (due to ship in December 2015) and music industry people – the company’s director of music Michael Thurber is a bassist for the Late Show with Steven Colbert. Plus composer Hans Zimmer is a fan so there’s that. If you didn’t back the project, you can put your name on the waiting list.
