The big noise about tiny microphones

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The lapel microphone, which can be clipped to clothing, has become the staple accessory of the content creation age. Held delicately between the thumbs and forefingers of thousands of influencers, this small, cheap device (available from £6.99, for a version that plugs into your phone) has become a fixture of social media. Often deliberately basic, capturing the occasional fight or explosion, the mini microphone is a quick way to convey that this is supposed to be an “authentic” and irreverent piece of content. The shape fits perfectly with the popularity of vox pops on social media (see comedian Kareem Rahma’s Subway Takes, or creator Caleb Simpson stopping people on the street in New York and asking them to visit his apartments). It has helped cement the device’s ubiquity – microphones are everywhere.

The rise of the lapel microphone is largely due to the rampant improvisation of entertainment broadcasts from home during confinement. ShureThe long-established American audio brand saw sales of technology in its “content creation portfolio” double over that period and current sales have continued to outpace pre-pandemic growth. This year, Shure launched a new content-specific product, MoveMicwhich sends two audio channels (to be able to record two voices) wirelessly and simultaneously to a user’s phone.

The Shure microphone is all about quality: it has very discreet, almost invisible branding. The Hunan-based company has taken the opposite approach. SonicakeIts wireless lavalier set includes a grey windscreen with fluffy tufts (similar to a “dead cat” boom mic used in movies) to reduce background noise. It was created in 2022 as a direct response to the content creation market and, worn by beauty bloggers almost like a brooch or accessory, is now one of the most recognisable mini microphones on the market. (The term “lavalier,” used for these lapel mics, comes from jewellery and originally denoted a pendant necklace.) Australian brand Amount is another popular and branded microphone visible in the high-level influencer economy.

Sonicake sold around 5,000 units in 2023. These sales may well generate respectable revenues of up to $89 per unit, but they also underscore something chimerical about the internet. I feel like I see Sonicake microphones everywhere, but the opposite is also true: a relatively small number of people are “influencing” (or at least being heard by) millions through their collective social media reach.

Microphones have always been a cultural amplifier. Recorded sound began to appear in the late 19th century, as engineers in the new age of telephony scrambled to innovate. One of the first inventions was the flared metal sound horn, which analyzed live speech and music through a diaphragm to move a needle and mark the waves in wax. Another major advance came with the popularization of electronic microphones in the mid-1920s, though there were still many limitations; those early microphones were rudimentarily sensitive, so much so that costume designers for the new “talking” studios of 1920s Hollywood had to choose the softest fabrics to prevent excess noise from being picked up on film.

It is tempting to project a commonality between the style and mood of different ages of microphones.

Gradually, technology allowed the microphone to become a chameleon of design. In retrospect, it’s tempting to project a strange blend between the style and mood of different microphone eras. The “candlestick” handheld microphones of wartime radio broadcasts seem stiff and formal, to suit the long years of bad news. The thin wired microphones wielded by TV reporters in the 1960s seem designed to complement the tube ties and skinny trouser legs of the day. In rock stadiums in the 1990s, carrying the microphone was often a big problem: it was a clunky piece of roadie equipment that threatened to refuse to work or to pump feedback through breezeblock-sized speakers. But even as its form changed, the microphone has had a constancy of purpose, standing between the transmitting and receiving extremes of most of the great music and political demonstrations of the last century. To wear the microphone was to take control of the narrative and create a story. It was something you dedicated yourself to. Mini microphones are suitable for the new century where anyone can be a broadcaster if they want to.

Last year, the Minneapolis-based agency BMP Creative BMP produced the Tiny Mic Interviews series for the red carpet premieres of Netflix-produced films and TV shows. This played into a more modern approach to celebrity, which is seeing unquestioning deference to famous people going out of fashion. BMP chose to use scaled-down versions of classic stage microphones rather than lavalier mics, gently deflating the idea that big stars deserve the highest-spec equipment.

The tiny devices brought their own challenges. Justin Johnson, BMP’s chief executive, says: “The tiny microphones – unsurprisingly – have terrible audio quality. We had to create specific editing templates to correct how bad these little microphones sound.” But Johnson says actors on the carpet find them refreshing. “Their first reaction, when they see how tiny the microphone is, is a great icebreaker.” Julia Roberts, at the premiere of Leave the world behind, She played with the format: Johnson says her team “didn’t expect her to just let loose and join in on the tiny-mic nonsense.”

But although they seem to be visible everywhere, microphones are also hidden in places where… No In 2022, the US Congress proposed the Eavesdropping Act, which would require “internet-connected devices that include a microphone to notify consumers how and under what circumstances the device collects information from ambient noise.” The underlying fear here has historical pedigree. Take, for example, the microphone hidden in a badge that Soviet boy scouts gave to the US ambassador to Moscow in 1945. It hung in his office listening to Cold War confidences until it was purged in 1952. Bill HR 538, introduced to the US Senate in January last year, proposed another law that would make it a crime not to warn consumers whether a smart device has a camera or microphone.

The next chapter could be even stranger: Instagram, for example, is supposedly Testing an AI program for select influencers that would allow a chatbot to learn and mimic their personality’s “voice” in text responses to fans. Creators would control the source data for machine learning and could include their audio from Reels and Stories.

But for now, our real voice remains valuable to Big Tech for a number of reasons. “Our voice can tell [listening] advertisers much more than we are thinking,” says Yotam Ophir, assistant professor at the University at BuffaloThe Media Effects, Disinformation and Extremism Lab at the University of Nottingham. “It can tell us whether we’re tired or not. Whether we’re feeling good. Whether talking about something excites us or bores us. The more devices we carry around that can record our voice, the more we’re telling companies and advertisers who we are in general.”

The microphone started in the music room, with musicians crowded around the speaker in an effort to be heard. Now we have to make decisions about whether or not to keep our distance.