Sound Barrier
After many days (over 2,000, if it matters), I went to the gym again. The layout had changed a bit, and some new equipment had been added... but something felt off. Then I realised—it was the music. The once-familiar peppy beats, played out loud for everyone, were missing. Instead, all I saw were people with headsets or AirPods, lost in their own worlds. It made me wonder.
Sound was once the great unifier of human experience. It was our earliest tool for connection—a way to greet, negotiate, confirm, and console. In its purest form, it was a bridge, a means to break barriers. Even ancient Vedic wisdom was codified as Shruti—wisdom that must be heard. Sound had to be received, absorbed, and shared.
Technology only amplified this connectivity. The radio, with programs like Binaca Geetmala, was once the centrepiece of the home, bringing families together. Church bells and temple gongs summoned people to congregate, reinforcing a shared sense of belonging. The ringing mobile phone —until spam calls from Bajaj Finance took over ??—was a harbinger of connection, a conversation waiting to unfold. For the longest time, sound was about reaching out.
But somewhere along the way, sound stopped uniting us—it started isolating us.
Today, take a look around in a metro, a bus, or a coffee shop. Noise-canceling headphones cocoon people in their own sonic bubbles, deliberately shutting out the world. Airports, once buzzing with conversations, are now filled with travellers immersed in their private audio realms. Yes, even gyms, once brimming with shared energy, are now silent apart from the whir of treadmills, each individual lost in their own curated playlist. The very force that once brought people together now keeps them apart.
Why has this happened?
As physical spaces become more crowded, the desire for personal space has intensified. But in a world where space is a luxury, people are carving out a new kind of territory—a sonic one. Headphones have become a modern Do Not Disturb sign, signalling the need for solitude in a crowd. The irony is stark: in a hyper-connected digital world, people are seeking refuge from one another in the very thing that was meant to connect them.
Like the saying, “Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter,” sound now serves as a tool for compression. Long commutes feel shorter with a podcast. Mundane tasks become tolerable with a soundtrack. Silence, once a space for introspection, is now something to be filled—preferably with audio content tailored to one’s taste. The unpredictability of human interaction is replaced by the certainty of a playlist, an audiobook, or an algorithmically curated radio station.
This shift isn’t just personal—it’s cultural. Conversations, once spontaneous and organic, are now mediated by technology. Voice notes replace real-time dialogue. Video calls come with a mute button, allowing selective engagement. Even homes, once filled with the background hum of shared conversations, are quieter—each member retreating into their own sonic world, be it through a gaming headset, a podcast, or an endless stream of Reels.
Sound’s role has fundamentally changed. It was once a medium of openness; now, it is a mechanism for control. What was once a shared experience is now privatised, customised, and, in many cases, monetised.
But perhaps the answer isn’t in reclaiming sound or creating more of it to break these barriers. Maybe, in a world saturated with noise, we need to rediscover silence—not as absence, but as presence. A quiet that isn’t empty, but full of awareness. Maybe it won’t be sound, but silence, that builds the bridges of the future.