Innovation from the disco sector

Innovations are a dime a dozen. Ho hum. Most of them will lead nowhere. But every so often, an innovation comes along that makes you feel like dancing.

This one is called “silent disco.” It’s the hot new trend, according to the New York Times. In a discotheque, patrons are connected to the music through personalized wireless headphones instead of a public sound system. This allows the club to stay open long hours without bugging the neighbours. The fun apparently comes from the fact that using headphones allows multiple disk jockeys to vie for popularity, with each headphone flashing the listener’s current preference in a distinct colour.

Hold on a second, you say: Isn’t part of the fun of disco sharing the experience with others? The article addresses that very point: “This is what we have been reduced to: dancing with ourselves…It’s isolating. Where’s the connection?” argues one skeptical patron. However, the author witnesses the spontaneous formation of a silent conga line and concludes that silence does not necessarily equate to isolation.

The silent disco concept is quickly catching on in other areas The wedding reception— where the urge to party into the wee hours brushes up against the need for silence past an early witching hour—has already been invaded by headphone entrepreneurs. There is no rule to say the headphone must stream only disco music— especially helpful at an all-ages reception where hip senior Uncle Jake insists on showing everyone he stlll has the moves to Mustang Sally, and a good chunk of the crowd has never heard, or ever cares to hear, Wilson Pickett. And there’s no rule to say the only dance form it can be employed with is disco. Why not, for example, revive interest in an old art form with silent square dances? Dancers wearing headphones could follow an electronically connected caller just as easy as a public caller.

Other applications scream out for attention. For instance, why not silent disco tradespeople? Why is it that people sanding your floors or fixing your roof think that they have the right to listen to New Country Nausea FM 96.6 at top volume all day long? Now that the technology permits it, why can’t the contract simply stipulate that they put on silent disco headphones? Don’t try to tell me the onus should be on me to somehow block out the noise if I don’t like it. And why, if I want to watch a hockey game, should I be subjected to 10-second bursts of

ear-numbing arena rock music merely because a faceoff has been whistled. Couldn’t those who want to listen to that music be connected by headphones, so that the rest of us can be spared?

We begin to tiptoe into muddy ground. Who should bear the onus for cancelling out the noise: the emitter or the unwilling listener? Is there a right to silence or a right to noise, or both? Can the line ever effectively be drawn, let alone enforced? Experience with our County noise by-law does not encourage one to think that it can.

For an example of really deep muddy ground, take a possible ‘silent Sunday sermon.’ Let’s say that the rule of normalcy is for silence in the church. Parishioners could each be given silent disco headphones through which they would be connected to the sermonizer, who could speak from behind a transparent but soundproof shield. If a listener were tempted to turn the volume on his or her headphones down so as to catch just the drift of the message while attempting simultaneously to complete the more difficult clues left over from the Saturday crossword puzzle, well, that’s the free market system for you, which ought to act as an incentive to pastoral excellence. Or perhaps the free market system might borrow from the multiple disk jockey practice and employ indicator lights to show up those headphones that are turned down. Which would, in turn, lead to the development of hearing aids that functioned primarliy as external noise cancelling devices; which would lead to the banning of the devices, which would lead to churches frisking people on entry, which would make churches more like discos, in which case people might just head straight for the discos, which would lead to an erosion of our spiritual fibre and hasten the demise of civilization as we know it.

Who knew that such far-reaching implications could originate from the disco sector? What next? Trappist disco: you dance in total silence, no sound from anywhere? Blind disco: your eyes are covered, making dance partner selection more random, and forming a spontaneous conga line a little more difficult? If either one of those comes to pass, I might have to take cover at the YMCA.

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca