Copenhagen-based audio tech startup Auricle has designed open-ear earbuds that provide high-quality sound while allowing the user to maintain situational awareness. 

Founded in November 2018, Auricle challenges the idea that personal audio technology has to take over your hearing and cover your ears in order to be of high quality. Leveraging bone conduction technology, which works by transmitting sound vibrations through the skull, bypassing the ear canal to go straight to the inner ear, the company has developed a device that gives users an optimal sonic experience without losing situational or spatial awareness. 

“The device is specifically designed to keep you fully functional and aware of your surroundings while you wear them,” says founder and CEO Pedro Costa. “It’s the complete opposite use case of noise cancellation.”

Reducing the stigma of hearing aids

The overarching goal behind Auricle is to create products that suit people with all sorts of hearing profiles, whether they have normal hearing or suffer from hearing loss, and Pedro says that he hopes the product will reduce the stigmatization associated with hearing technologies like hearing aids. 

Prior to founding Auricle, Pedro was an acoustics engineer who balanced a love of music with partial hearing loss. Noticing a lack of headphones on the market that both looked and sounded good while allowing for situational awareness, he put together a team of five people from varied professional backgrounds to design the first Auricle device. 

The company’s longer-term goal is to contribute to expanding access to hearing technology and the team is striving to expand the product range and innovate for all types of listeners. To Pedro, this ambition is necessary because “globally, [access to this sort of technology] is a disaster.” 

Why use bone conduction technology?

Because bone-conduction allows listeners to hear surrounding sound, Auricle users remain aware of traffic noises and can easily communicate with others while enjoying music or other audio. Auricle sees a listening experience that allows for situational awareness as a safer and more sociable option than noise-cancelling headphones.

Pedro says that the Auricle device is a complete out-of-the-box product that challenges the conventional design of regular headphones and other bone-conduction options available. “99% of bone-conduction headphones available today are terrible for listening to music,” he says. But after months of testing, measurements and usability investigations, Auricle claims to have achieved sound quality results comparable to in-ear headphones across most of the hearing spectrum. 

“All aspects of it are challenging,” says Pedro. “The industrial design, the ergonomics and fit, the electronics, the firmware and the software… but if you want to truly innovate, you have to spend thousands of hours refining the details.”

Auricle’s future plans

As of March 2021, Auricle is in the final stages of product development and preparing to launch a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. The startup remains open to different funding propositions and plans to make the device available globally, with the its main target markets being Europe, the US, Canada and Australia.  

Pedro says that building a business from scratch has been a challenge. “I think what most people don’t really think about is that it is a very visceral experience,” he says. “You’re completely exposed to any possible outcome, there’s no safety net, and that is quite a hardcore thing to experience, especially if you’re doing it for the first time.”

Main photo: Auricle