Maybe it wouldn’t be your choice of tune, but accepting things that are out of your control is a humbling experience – and so is accepting the joy of other people.

The melodic vocals of Aaradhna and Savage drift up the road, carried along the footpath by a bluetooth-speaker-toting pedestrian. He’s blasting ‘They Don’t Know’, a 2012 love song about desire and social judgment. It hit number three in the charts, familiar enough to spur a nodding of heads as we all cluster at the traffic lights. This kind of shared moment during a morning commute is a rare thing indeed. And it’s a joy.

Private listening is the norm these days. Bluetooth earpods sit discreetly inside ears, designed to be unobtrusive and “block distractions” with “all-day comfort”. You could wear them for hours if you wanted to (people do) to tune everything out. On the other end of the size spectrum are the large noise-cancelling headphones that insulate their owner from the auditory mess of the city – the buses, beggars and pedestrian lights buzzing.

What they’re playing is known only to the wearer and their god (or algorithm), but you can take a guess. Is that suited man listening to Joe Rogan or Johann Sebastian Bach? What about that teenager, are they hearing Olivia Rodrigo or a lecture? Outside the aural cocoon is morning birdsong, but they don’t know.

Some pedestrians go another route entirely, opting instead for bluetooth speakers to soundtrack their daily lives. The street is their stage and these players present every genre under the sun to their reluctant audience: restless hip hop, syrupy pop hits and the many power anthems of classic rock. It’s a confident decision. Sharing your musical taste with a public forum takes balls.

Is it socially acceptable? Perhaps not. Wade into the gripe-fest of Reddit and you’ll find many vexed New Zealanders who loathe the practice (suggested responses range from physical violence to council bylaws). But I’ve come to love it.

Rather than feel irritated by audible music, you could treat it as a connective wavelength. Bluetooth speakers give us a direct line to someone’s musical sensibilities. We’re hearing that song because someone wanted to play it; they needed to hear it that morning. Whether restricted to the finite number of audio files saved on their device or only by the bounds of Spotify or YouTube, they chose this track for a reason. 

Music brings people together – listening to it with someone else has been shown to increase neural alignment, pleasure and social bonding – whether you like it or not. Bluetooth speakers provide a collective listening experience that unites everyone in the vicinity. Sure, maybe you’d rather hear Bar Italia than K’Lee as you navigate a bus stop, but in a similar vein to a shakti mat or ice bath, sacrificing some comfort can be good for you. It’s a compromise. Accepting things that are out of your control is a humbling experience. Accepting the joy of other people is too. Our cultural feeding troughs (phones and computers) are calibrated to what’s meant to be our personal taste. Bluetooth speakers puncture that by pouring in unexpected flavours at inopportune times. They deliver surprise or delight, sometimes even both.

Playing music out loud is a rebellious act; it chafes against quiet decorum while claiming shared space. People who do it are making a conscious decision, a statement: hear me, see me, feel me. They’re also existing publicly at a time when physical spaces feel further and further away from the online. (We’re not one with the machine, yet.) Want an analogue existence? Listen to that bluetooth speaker walking past you. They dangle off belt loops, fit inside bags or nestle under an arm like a football.

The music they blast out feels like an outward expression of joy in an AirPod-littered world. Those are starting to affect how we experience life. Psychologists caution that “aurally induced disconnection” is impacting our emotional wellbeing and contributing to social isolation. The over-use of noise-cancelling headphones has been linked to auditory processing disorder, a neurological condition where the brain struggles to translate ambient sound, which audiologists in the UK are diagnosing in more and more young people. Although technological improvements, like Apple’s adaptive audio, allow people to filter distracting noises, the sound that reaches them still comes via their headphones, rather than the world around them.

But out there, untethered from the insular swaddle of buds and pods, bluetooth speakers roam free. Aaradhna and Savage are nearly done. The speaker’s owner is still singing along in the sunshine; he’s having a great start to his day. Now, I am too.