Following the US presidential debate in which Donald Trump accused immigrants in Ohio of eating pet dogs, Kamala Harris was accused of wearing an earpiece by online right-wing activists.
This is no ordinary earpiece, but a pair of “audio earrings” far-right commentators suggest Ms Harris used to receive information from her team mid-debate.
Did she? The company that makes the audio earrings Ms Harris is accused of using, the Nova Audio H1, says it has “no knowledge about what earrings Harris wore”, according to Forbes.
Look close enough at the photos taken at the presidential debate and you can see that, while Ms Harris’s pearl earrings bear some resemblance to the Nova H1, they are not the same.
The Nova H1 are audio earrings partially funded through a crowdfunding programme on Kickstarter, started in 2023.
They may look, and are, unusual. However, they are also part of what is probably the fastest growing sub-category of headphones: the open earphone.
These pairs do not sit inside your ear canal or nestle behind your tragus. They instead direct sound into your ear, from the outside. This directionality is designed to minimise sound leakage. The Bose Open Ultra are one recent high-profile example of this style of earphone.
Open earphones are pretty terrible for use on public transport, but can be useful for people, like runners, who want to be more aware of their surroundings.
The earrings Ms Harris wore at the presidential debate differ from the Nova Audio H1 in one key respect. Where the H1 have a solid piece connecting the front pearl section to the backing, Ms Harris’s pair uses a set of thin stems.
This matters because the electronics of the Nova Audio H1 are distributed between the front and back sections, joined by wiring. Inside of a wireless earphone earpiece you’ll find a speaker driver, a battery and, at minimum, a circuit board providing the Bluetooth chip, digital-to-analogue converter and the tiny low-powered earphone amplifier circuit.
As a result, in the Nova Audio H1, the backing is a lot thicker than the front portion, minus pearl.
Open earphones are also not a great fit for the kind of monitoring purposes Ms Harris is accused of anyway. While they exhibit lower sound leakage than a pair of traditional open-back headphones, there would still be a much greater chance of audio being picked up by the microphone than with a traditional broadcast in-ear monitor.
An example of an earpiece that might be used for this sort of job is the Phonak Roger Earpiece V2. It weighs just 1.3g, delves deep into the wearer’s ear canal and comes in skin-matching colours to avoid being picked up by studio cameras. However, there is absolutely no suggestion that either Ms Harris or Mr Trump were wearing one.
