On the listener who only has headphones

A real share of the listeners on these playlists never play them through a speaker. Headphones, all the way through, on the train, at the desk, in bed. The room around the listener is whichever room the listener is in, not the room the music was made for. This changes the listening more than people realise.

Headphones make everything more intimate. A piano recording that sounds present in a room sounds whispered through headphones. The reverb tail of an ambient piece, which fills a room, fills your skull at the same volume. Tracks that were chosen partly for room-filling — long sustained tones, drones — sit slightly differently when the room is replaced by the head.

For the rooms here, this is mostly fine. The same tracks that work in rooms work in headphones, with one or two small adjustments. Anything with hard pans, sounds that suddenly shift to one ear, is wrong in headphones in a way it isn't in a room. So those tracks don't go on. Otherwise the rooms are listenable both ways.

What I haven't done is build a separate playlist for headphone-only listeners. There's a brief there — more intimacy, more detail, more close-recorded music — that the room playlists don't quite capture. It's on the list of rooms I might build one day. So far the existing ones are enough.