No, this isn't blindness related specifically, but we all listen to them.
kelly
The new York times
July 29, 1999
Humming Off Key For Two Decades
______________________________________________________________
In 1979, the Sony Walkman Made Music Portable and Heralded the Age
of Personal Electronics
By PHIL PATTON
On the original model of the Sony Walkman, introduced in the
United States 20 years ago this month, there was an orange button.
The TPS-L2, a blue-black plastic model released in this country
under the name Soundabout, played cassette tapes, but it also had a
second earphone jack and an extra set of earphones. When you pushed
the orange button, the sound emerged from two sets of phones.
It was a revealing feature: Sony was apparently worried about the
solitary nature of the device. The orange button was like a panic
button, an emergency "share" feature. The company was hesitant to
release a product that could be considered selfish, Akio Morita, a
Sony co-founder, wrote later.
The orange button was soon removed and the name Soundabout was
replaced with Walkman, the name under which the device had been
released in Japan six months earlier. Sony's invention quickly
became an enormous success, largely because of its solitary nature.
Competitors introduced rival products into the new category of
"personal portable audio," but the trademark name Walkman became
synonymous in everyday speech with personal portable tape player.
Now, on the 20th anniversary, the Walkman is close to a staple;
more than 185 million have been sold. A Walkman very much like the
model that cost $200 20 years ago can be found for $20,
blister-wrapped on the shelves of discount stores or even drugstore
chains.
The basic shape of the first model has evolved into many models and
styles of Walkmans (Sony's preferred plural): personal sound
demanded personal style.
Stephen Bayley, a design historian, calls the Walkman one of the
most significant products of its time. For many years, it
symbolized the success of Japan's economy, as well as the skill of
its engineers in miniaturization and of its marketers in sales and
packaging.
It even evoked the Japanese tradition of design: the blue-black
case resembled a traditional Japanese lacquered box.
More important, the Walkman changed people's relationship to
technology; its solitary, enveloping quality became its defining
feature. The Walkman and its rivals quickly became a landmark in
the history of media and a symbol of an inwardly focused era.
"Personal sound" was a forerunner of personal computers and
personal digital assistants.
Michael Schiffer, author of "The Portable Radio in American Life"
(University of Arizona Press, 1991), notes that the idea of private
portable music was initiated in the mid-1950's by the transistor
radio with its single earpiece. The difference the Walkman brought,
Professor Schiffer said in an interview, was to free the listener
from dependence on the fixed programs of radio. The tape cassette
(first introduced in 1965) allowed people to choose their music.
People made tapes of their favorite music, but they also purchased
recorded tapes.
By 1983 the Walkman had helped push sales of cassette tapes past
those for vinyl records.
Robert Nell, Sony's vice president in charge of audio products,
said that the Walkman "provided listeners with a personal
soundtrack to their lives."
Stephen Holt, of the design firm Frogdesign, which provided Sony
with alternative designs in the early days of the Walkman, said
that the Walkman "brought a kind of spectacle to daily life and
made humdrum activities feel cinematic."
Three decades ago, the sociologist Edward Hall introduced the
concept of the space bubble, a culturally conditioned distance that
dictates how close people stand to others and how much space
someone needs to feel comfortable.
The Walkman might be said to have introduced another kind of
bubble: a technogical bubble of concentration and obliviousness to
surroundings, a private space in public. Today, the streets are
full of cellular telephone users enveloped in similar bubbles of
communication and concentration. Palm organizers and other small
digital devices have similar effects.
The psychological effects showed up first with the Walkman: note
how the mobile Walkman user boldly makes eye contact with other
pedestrians, as if somehow unconsciously reasoning that because
onlookers cannot hear what he is listening to, they also cannot see
what he is looking at.
Having arrived at the beginning of the 80's, the Walkman seems to
have signaled the beginning of a time of introspection, even
narcissism. Holt recalls hearing and reading the sentiment in the
early 1980's that the Walkman fostered dangerous isolation and
immersion. That immersion led to traffic laws forbidding drivers to
wear the devices, lest they fail to hear a crucial horn or siren.
[INLINE]
A Space of One's Own
All figures are for the Walkman cassette players only.
The First Walkman
Released July 1979
Price: $199.95
Name:Walkman(Japan)
Soundabout(United States)
Freestyle(Australia)
Stowaway(Britain)
Number of Models Distributed Since 1979:
In Japan: 180
Worldwide: more than 600
Sales Since 1979
186 million as of March 1999
Landmarks In 1983, for the first time, the number of prerecorded
cassettes sold in the United States (236 million) exceeded that of
LP's.
In 1986 the trademarked name Walkman was included in the Oxford
English Dictionary.
_________________________________________________________________
There are many different accounts of the creation of the Walkman.
One widely disseminated tale had Akio Morita playing tennis and
wishing that he could have his music with him on the court. That
corporate myth is in keeping with the Japanese business tradition
of crediting a company's leader with all important innovations.
Another apocryphal tale had Morita visiting a factory and talking
to a worker who asked for tunes on the assembly line. (Here the
chief executive figures as benevolent boss.)
But the most convincing account, pieced together from Sony's own
documents and Morita's autobiography, "Made in Japan," ascribes the
Walkman idea to Masaru Ibuka, with whom Morita had founded the
company. Ibuka was the more technical of the pair and often visited
the development laboratories. He expressed frustration at not being
able to carry his favorite music with him on airplanes.
To please him, in November 1978 a Sony engineer named Shizuo
Takashino began with the Pressman, a Sony tape recorder popular
among reporters. He removed the recording apparatus and speaker and
added a stereo amplifier. The only real technical breakthrough was
the development of light headphones, with their little sponge
earpieces.
These were found in a laboratory next door.
The revealing part of Morita's tale regards the reaction when he
took the prototype Walkman home. "I noticed my experiment was
annoying my wife, who felt shut out," he reported in his book, so
he ordered the addition of a second headset jack and the orange
button. Morita "thought it would be considered rude for one person
to be listening to his music in isolation."
Sony's sales staff had another worry -- that no one would buy a
tape player that could only play, not record. Morita insisted that
it be a player only. Car stereo players didn't record and no one
minded, he pointed out. Without any market testing, the product was
ordered into production within four months.
The virtuosity of the first Walkman was that it daringly exposed
precise technology to the perils of portability.
In the years since, personal music technology has improved a great
deal. The first Walkman could run for 8 hours on a single charge of
its batteries; today's models can run for 60. But for listening to
sound on the go, tape was succeeded by the portable CD. From the
Walkman sprang the Discman and the Watchman and their competitors.
Sony's Minidisc, a format that has still not caught on, continues
the tradition, as do portable MP3 devices like the Diamond Rio and
Creative's Nomad: different media, same message.
Sony continues to tinker with the device it made famous. There is a
Walkman room in a Sony building in the Shinagawa section of Tokyo
that housed the advanced engineering team for the company. It is
the only place in the world where an example of each of the
200-some Walkman models is preserved. The best known are displayed
in a glass box of 30 cubicles; shelves contain dozens more. There
are hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of variants in color and
material. No one in the company seems to know quite how many.
Richard Gioscia, director of Sony's design center in Park Ridge,
N.J., said the phrase "lifestyle enhancement" was now used to match
the design of individual Walkman models to activities like running
or camping -- the Walkman had quickly become associated with
athletic activity. People ran or did aerobics with their machines
in hand. But when the designers really looked at runners using the
devices, Gioscia said, they found that instead of clipping them to
their waistbands or belts, they tended to carry them. So his
designers developed "grip" models.
_________________________________________________________________
The personal tape player gave a restless generation handpicked music
to go.
_________________________________________________________________
Changes in fashion have brought white, then black, then silver
Walkmans. The Sports line took its yellow from the bright color of
scuba divers' air tanks. A line called Outback came in sand-colored
plastic and had a ribbed body, signaling ruggedness like a Jeep
Sahara vehicle.
In the United States, Sony has offered models called Freq and Psyc.
Aimed at teen-agers, the Psyc line clips to a belt or backpack.
Some Psyc models are molded of the same translucent blues and
greens as the iMac computer.
"I am as different as they are," the slogan for the Psyc line,
would serve as a worthy motto for the whole history of the Walkman.
A product that began as a basic box, a universal sound appliance,
has taken on as many different shapes and styles as the music
played on it.
Increasingly models have been developed for varying markets around
the world. In Europe, there is Yppy, a ribbed metallic line, as
rigid as the techno music popular there. In Japan there are
glow-in-the-dark Walkmans and models inspired by the Hello Kitty
line of characters.
Last year, Sony released a kidney-shape plastic model called Beans.
It was the first Walkman to be designed by a woman, Rie Isono. Its
shape suggested a device as vital to daily life as an internal
organ.
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