Listening to music with ear buds that seal off my ear canals, it seem to me as if the music is actually coming from inside my head. For some reason it seem like the sound is coming from the back of my head, a little above the collar line. The effect is lessened if there are extreme stero mixes like different instruments in only one channel or another.
It doesn’t seem that way (to me) at all with external phones, even the big ones that surround the ears. They sound external. They don’t fool my brain.
And I really love the effect. I have a set of ear buds small and comfortable enough to sleep in, and I often do. I crank down the volume a fair amount on the iPod and just go to bed listening to music that comes from in my head. Which has also made for some very interesting dreams, as some now seem to have soundtracks.
I fall asleep listening to podcasts and music with earbuds. I don’t use anything else, but I recently tried the headphones I use at church when I operate the soundboard. It was very, very nice. The quality was much better.
I use them to go BACK to sleep. If I wake up in the wee hours, it’s hard to get back to sleep because I’m thinking about all the problems I’ll be dealing with in the morning.
But if I put on an audiobook I’ll be thinking about the plot instead of worrying.
Note: If you try it, DON’T pick a really exciting book where somebody suddenly YELLS or SCREEEEEAMS! Why, yes, I do speak from shaky, sheet-clutching experience.
I’ve found a couple of wonderfully expressive (but calm!) readers that I can count on drifting off to… George Guidell reading the CAT WHO series, Tony Britton or *Jonathan Cecil *reading Dick Francis, Judy Kaye reading the K is for Kinsey Milhone books, or Frank Muller reading The Great Gatsby (… or reading anything – his rendition of the Greater Milwaukee White Pages N-Z is classic).