The big noise about tiny microphones

The lavalier microphone, which can clip to clothing, has become the staple accessory of the content-creation age. Held daintily between a gazillion influencers’ thumbs and forefingers, this tiny, cheap (available from about £6.99, for a version that plugs into your phone) device has become a fixture of the social media scroll. Often deliberately basic, catching the odd scuffle or plosive, the mini mic is a quick way to convey that this is supposedly an “authentic”, irreverent piece of content. The form fits perfectly with the social media popularity of vox pops (see comedian Kareem Rahma’s Subway Takes, or creator Caleb Simpson, who stops people on the street in New York and asks for tours of their apartments). It has helped cement the device’s ubiquity: microphones are everywhere.  

The boom time of the lavalier mic owes a lot to the panicked improvisation of entertainment broadcast from people’s homes during lockdown. Shure, the heritage American audio brand, saw sales in tech from its “content creation portfolio” double during that period and current sales have continued to exceed pre pandemic growth. This year Shure launched a new content-specific product, MoveMic, which sends two channels of audio (so you can record two voices) wirelessly and simultaneously to a user’s phone. 

The Shure mic is betting on quality – it has very discreet, almost invisible branding. The opposite approach has been taken by Hunan-based company Sonicake. Its wireless lavalier set features a grey fluffy tufted wind muff (similar to a “dead cat” boom mic used on films) to reduce background noise. It was created in 2022 in 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 mics on the market. (The term “lavalier”, used for such lapel mics, is borrowed from jewellery, originally denoting a pendant necklace.) Australian brand Røde is another popular and visibly branded mic in the higher-end influencer economy. 

Sonicake sold around 5,000 units in 2023. Such sales may well yield respectable revenues at up to $89 a pop, but they also underline something chimerical about the internet. I feel as if I see the Sonicake mics 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 in the late 19th century as engineers in the new era of telephony jostled to innovate. One of the earliest inventions was the flared metal sound horn, which parsed live voice and music through a diaphragm to move a stylus to mark the waves on wax. Another breakthrough came with the popularisation of electronic mics in the mid 1920s, though there were still plenty of limitations; those early mics were crudely sensitive, so much so that costume designers in the new “talking” studios of 1920s Hollywood had to pick out the softest fabrics to avoid excess rustling being picked up on film.

Røde Lavalier GO lavalier microphone, £54, scan.co.uk

Sonicake wireless lavalier microphone system, $79.99

It’s tempting to project a match between the style and mood of microphone ages

Gradually, technology enabled the microphone to become chameleon in design. Retrospectively, it’s tempting to project an uncanny match between the style and mood of the different microphone ages. The handheld “candlestick” mics of wartime radio broadcasts look stiff and formal, to fit the long years of bad news. The slim corded mics wielded by television reporters in the 1960s look all but designed to complement the pencil ties and cigarette trouser legs of the time. In ’90s rock stadiums, taking the mic used to be a big deal – it was a clumsy bit of roadie kit that threatened either to refuse to work or to squall feedback through breezeblock-sized loudspeakers. But even as its form changed, the microphone has had a constancy in purpose, standing between the transmitting and receiving ends of most great music and political rallying of the last century. To take the mic was to take control of the narrative, and create a story. It was something you stepped up to. Mini mics are fit for the new century in which anyone can be a broadcaster if they so choose. 

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

The little gadgets brought their own challenges. Justin Johnson, chief executive of BMP, says: “The tiny mics – not surprisingly – have terrible audio quality. We had to build specific editing templates to correct for just how bad these little mics sound.” But Johnson says actors on the carpet find them refreshing. “Their first reaction, when they see just how dang tiny the mic is, is a great ice breaker.” Julia Roberts, at the premiere of Leave the World Behind, played along with the format – Johnson says his team “did not expect her to let loose and join in on the silliness that is tiny mic”.

But though they might seem to be visible everywhere, microphones also lurk in places where you don’t see them – in 2022, the United States Congress proposed the Eavesdrop 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 mic hidden in a plaque given by Soviet boy scouts in 1945 to the US Ambassador to Moscow. It hung in his office earwigging Cold War confidences until debugged 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 if a smart device has a camera or a microphone,. 

The next chapter could be even weirder: Instagram, for example, is reputedly testing an AI program for select influencers that would enable a chatbot to learn and mimic their personality’s “voice” in text replies to fans. The creators would control the source data for machine learning, and could potentially include their audio from Reels and Stories. 

But, for the moment, our real voice remains valuable to big tech for a variety of reasons. “Our voice can tell [listening] advertisers much more than just what we are thinking about,” says Yotam Ophir, assistant professor in the University at Buffalo’s Media Effects, Misinformation and Extremism lab. “It can suggest whether we are tired or not. If we feel well. If talking about something excites or bores us. The more devices we carry around that can record our voice, the more we tell companies and advertisers about who we are in general.” 

The microphone began in the music parlour, with players crowding around the sound horn in an effort to be heard. Now we have decisions to make about whether or not to keep our distance.