Earphones - why is there a left and right and does it matter which side you hear through?

Answer 1

Left ear is controlled by right hemisphere of brain.
Right ear is controlled by left hemisphere of brain.

So, it does matter: if you are a right hander - right ear is the best suited for listening and left is best for music. The vice versa is true for southpaws.

Check the sources for more interesting information and findings.

Answer 2

If you are listening to orchestra music, you would want the music to reach your ears as if you are sitting in front of the orchestra. If you put the headphones on backwards, it will sound like the orchestra is sitting reversed from the standard position. For some people, that would drive them nuts.

If you are watching a big screen TV and a car comes from the left and races across the screen to the right you would want the sound to match the car motion. If you put the head phones on backwards, the car sounds will go the opposite direction as the car video. That would take away from the movie experience.

Since the headphones are made symmetrically, there is no logical reason to put them on backwards. On the other hand, if you want to show how stupid you are.....go ahead.

Answer 3

There are lots of God blessing and human technologies going into the issues you asked. With only one ear we can hear but cannot tell where the sound comes from. With two ears, distancing each other properly, the small difference of time a sound takes to reach each one of the two and the way it bounces tell us wher the sound came from.

To replicate the sounds just the ways they originally came out from various angles while their sources moving alive, e.g. a car racing across or of a jet flying by, we need two earphones.

Which earphone goes to which ear, does it matter? It makes no difference if you only listen to a stream of audio. However, if you also watch a movie, you may wrongly train your brain how to coordinate its senses by letting it hear the sounds running form left to right while seeing the source-objects rushing from right to left. Prolonged exposure may cause such wield impulses such as your head automatically turning left when you hear a car's loud noise coming from the right: It may not be fun to behave like that. There's a name exactly for such left-right swap impulse, but I cannot recall it now :)

Answer 4

Yup,it doesn't matter which side it is as long you can hear the sound from both of the sides.