Have you ever wondered, or paid attention, to that little voice in your head? No, I don't mean your conscience, the one that silently whispers no to smoking and yes to studying. Nor am I talking about the voice of your conversations with imaginary friends and objects. Its not metaphorically or symbolically that I say "voice inside your head". I'm talking about the voice that echoes from somewhere in the middle of your brain. The small voice that is reading these words at this instant. And without this voice, reading would be impossible.
Have you ever wondered, or paid attention, to ear-phones? Well, who really hasn't? These small discs or spheres which are for some reason almost always black have the power to transport you to a new world, make you feel like you are floating, your feet firmly on the floor but your head in the clouds. Ear-phones are perhaps man's brightest invention for the broken souls (as long as they're not tangled), not only barring the entry of nagging and complaining voices of fellow beings and replacing it with the language of the soul; music but also making sure the noise comes from nowhere.
We are born with ears so fine tuned that we can identify a certain direction with every single sound, be it the leaves rustling in the light morning breeze in a rain-forest, the mechanical ticking of a clock or even an aircraft deafeningly taking off in the vicinity. If however, you remember this post the next time you put on ear-phones, be sure, for a few seconds at least, to try and single out the exact direction the music emanates from. And you would be pleasantly surprised to see that the voice emanates from within, somewhere near the middle of your brain, beneath the corpus callosum (if I remember my biology well). Exactly from where the little voice that is reading these lines has it's source. What would surprise you (albeit pleasantly) is not the fact that the voice coming from precisely here is out of the ordinary, but because you have probably never noticed that it came from right here.
And that is perhaps why ear-phone music seems to have that edge over other sources of music under the "effectively reaching the soul" category. When you listen from a ear phone, the lack of any direction makes it seem like it is you who singing to yourself. From your brain to your brain. Rather than mouth to ear, which is a rather messy business involving the cacophony of the world at large.
Delving even deeper into the little matter of the direction, if sound were a vector quantity, a physical quantity with magnitude and direction, then this inner voice would be like a zero vector, a vector which doesn't have any direction. Or as my physics teacher once said with great insight, a vector with all directions.
The inner voice rouses the soul the most effectively, and ear phones eliminate direction, aiding us in pretending that our very own inner voice is singing. The voice which comes from nowhere, but feels like it is surrounding us, from everywhere.