250 Earbuds Dangle from This Headphone Wig

Japanese designers PARTY made a hairpiece of hundreds of earbuds.

by DJ Pangburn

March 13, 2016, 3:00pm

All images courtesy of PARTY

Modern handheld technology, starting with the Walkman and progressing to the iPod and then modest smartphones, has made listening to music a pretty isolated experience. Whether someone is walking the street with earbuds or sat at a laptop with studio-quality headphones, they’ve tuned in and dropped out of the social world. But Tokyo and New York-based designers PARTY, a group of creative coders and technologists who build electronics, have created a rather tongue-in-cheek solution to this social issue. Their latest creation is Song Wig, a hairpiece made of dozens of earbuds, allowing the user to share his or her listening experience with others.

“We wanted to make something reflecting the feeling of each [type] of music but also practical to enhance the shareability of music,” PARTY’s Miho Ishizuka tells The Creators Project. “We just wanted to propose a new way to enjoy music at this time when the music industry is in a difficult situation.

“And I’m bald and very into this kind of idea actually,” adds PARTY’s Qanta Shimizu.

Song Wig works with smartphones, tablets and computers via a bluetooth connection. The bluetooth signal sends the music to an audio receiver on the wig, which transmits them to two tiny amplifiers that then send the music to each of the 250 earbuds which are soldered and glued in place. Song Wig, which is powered by a lithium polymer battery, also comes with an LED hair-tie ring with a microcontroller.

PARTY will offer Song Wig in three colors and textures—Pop Star, Reggae Guru and Classical Maestro. The Pop Star wig is for pop music lovers who want to flaunt their “idol charisma with ponytails and LED bling.” The Reggae Guru, with its “swirly and thick dreadlocks,” is for reggae and chill-out music lovers. And Classical Maestro hairpiece is designed to allow users to channel their inner Mozart with “pure white curls.”

This gives Song Wig some cross-ethnic and generational appeal. But it’s very much wait and see to see how its target users—partiers, fashionistas, musicians and DJs—respond to it it down at SXSW this week. Shimizu insists that PARTY isn’t taking the piss out of tech culture and consumers. That said, he does have complex feelings about a lot of tech companies at SXSW, which are exhibiting weird and useless Internet of Things devices.

“We’re always thinking how we can propose something weird like this as an alternative way to approach this society and tech trend,” Shimizu says. “A tech trend sometimes ignores the “poetic” aspect of human nature. We would like to make something against that and tickle consumer’s brain in other ways.”