That’s a fascinating take. Music until very recently was indeed an incredibly social activity bound with layers of talent, leisure (purpose/meaning/security), belonging, etc.
As people have been chatting about the Metaverse or AR I often quip that we’ve already had AR for awhile: headphones.
The ubiquitous of AirPods, even amongst employees on the clock in recent years, has only reinforced my belief that we are already deep down the AR rabbit hole and seeing both the positive and negative effects. Augmented reality is great, but we still need to be grounded and able to act within reality. It’s the reality that must be our base, not the augmented part. The augmented should serve to improve reality, not replace.
One of the most enjoyable musical experiences I had recently was on a choir exchange in Europe. We were at a concert afterparty with choirs from two other countries, exchanging drunken folk songs. Were we pleasant to listen to? Probably not. It was raucous and out of tune, but it was a bunch of people sharing something we loved.
Singing in adult choirs has been one of my most spiritually and socially rewarding activities. You really feel a brother in arms with your fellow singers. Perhaps it is because singing is such an embarrassing activity in isolation, but then the sheer force of all the voices come together to make something of such power and beauty that you are incapable of replicating yourself. I’ll never forget the tenors I sang Faures Requiem or Beethoven 9th with.
i had a similar experience in scouting. german scouting has a strong singing tradition to the point that there are regular competitions that attract groups from all over europe. also camps where multiple groups meet. imagine your after party experience every night for multiple days, maybe even a week or two.
We created office jobs that required sustained individual focus.
The traditional (high-walled) cube farm may be ugly, but it's also one where an employee could often work at their desk with relatively few distractions. If you're not going to build private offices, they're not that awful of a compromise for enabling focus.
Then in the past decade or two, we had the open-office trend, and changed the office to one full of endless visual and auditory distractions making focus difficult.
Employees wearing headphones at work is an obvious attempt by many to reduce the distractions that bad office design has created.
As people have been chatting about the Metaverse or AR I often quip that we’ve already had AR for awhile: headphones.
The ubiquitous of AirPods, even amongst employees on the clock in recent years, has only reinforced my belief that we are already deep down the AR rabbit hole and seeing both the positive and negative effects. Augmented reality is great, but we still need to be grounded and able to act within reality. It’s the reality that must be our base, not the augmented part. The augmented should serve to improve reality, not replace.