Do you take this touch-sensitive musical mistress to be your leather-wearing, pocket-dwelling wife? i-Do.

A techno-nostalgic article by Susie Rushton inside The Independent's new i newspaper I read today has impelled a futuristic epiphany to dawn on me: sound will be completely controllable by everyone individually in the years yet to pass us by. Why do I propose this isolationist concept when I'm all about celebrating the shared euphoria of the music-mad generation? Seeing as we are currently in the process of substituting status updates on Facebook and tweets on Twitter for actual transferable conversation, I figured why not contemplate the outmoding of traditional listening as well. But briefly allow me to preach my adoration for those influential little i-watsits. A sentence from Rushton's piece on the putting out to pasture of last century's beloved personal cassette players, or Walkmen, described them as a seminal gift that "came to promote introversion, day-dreaming and private pleasure".

That astute sentence got me thinking about how much I adore my impulse-bought iPod and the constant use that I get out of it and its addictive touch-screen capability. Before the summer of my beautiful iPod romance took to the wing on the music sheet of my average lad life, I had already spent well over a quarter of my years as a teen under the influence of the world's most potent drug, aka music. From the mellow acoustics of the Stereophonics on You Gotta Go There To Come Back to the synapse-shattering metal growl of Christian Machado on Ill Nino's debut album Revolution Revolucion, my ears were definitely the most valuable parts of my body to me and still are today, despite how much I appreciate and require the other senses.

Now, thanks to the glorious contraption that is Apple's no. 1 iPod, I can go about my daily bipedal business with an eclectic accompaniment direct at hand – even better is the fact that iPods radiate intense electronic sex appeal, being the portable music player equivalent of a young Patrick Swayze or Tom Selleck. But back to what Rushton reminded me about. The invention of her favourite original Walkman was the introduction of a 'fading out' device into modern society. As she perceptively notes, accessories such as the iPod have the unique ability to block all or most intrusive background noise out, allowing the user to 'fade out' of any given interactive situation. It's this phenomenon of instant sound insulation that makes these personal jukeboxes so undeniably popular.

The key benefit is the control that can be accessed at the effortless push of a button or, in the case of the iPod Touch, the swipe of a screen. Whether you've been bottled into a tube carriage on the London Underground at rush hour or you simply find yourself drifting off in a lecture that you foolishly decided might be worth attending, the wonder that is the personal music player is both our entertainer and saviour in this relentless digital storm we're trapped in, which leads me to my next point, albeit of speculation. As we are in a position where we no longer have to aversely pay attention to every inconsequential molecular vibration that occurs around us without the sacrifice of self-induced deafness or earplugs (who would wish to hear only their own thoughts anyway?), perhaps soon we will be able to selectively open and close specific wavelengths of sound, thus making us available only to that which we deem worthy of our ear drums.

Heck, we may not even require the physical response of our ear drums to sound; we could, theoretically, augment the interpreter in our brain with a modification that constantly receives transmitted vibration and breaks the nearest sounds down into finite categories to be edited through choice, kind of like the list your computer formulates when it detects a range of wireless signals in a crowded room. This would be the pinnacle of selective hearing and the materialisation of what Walkmen, mp3s and iPods have so far enabled us to do. Of course, there would be some inevitable ethical and practical obstacles to the success of the personal inner player, or PIP – just consider how appropriate that would sound as Apple's latest and greatest innovation in the development of tiny technology.

Firstly, let's ask ourselves honestly whether or not we would stayed tuned in during those tedious collision conversations with that person you used to work with/date/be pals with at high school. Absolutely not! With PIP no one needs to feel obliged to be nice to near-perfect strangers; just edit those frequencies and fade away. Sadly, there would be times when you would either converge with others to the same frequency or be forced to because necessity or decorum dictated it, i.e. when dinner's ready. For those other negligible announcements like political broadcasts during elections or grating noises like road works you could quite happily fade out without any moral wars waged against yourself.

Secondly, problems would arise when practical scenarios such as respecting the boss's air time at staff meetings and acknowledging the direction of gunfire in combat zones were faded out of. I'm not accusing professionals and other dedicated people in employment of casual escapism – technically I can because PIP is a concept I just created – but I'd bet my neglected previous mp3 player episodes of this nature would manifest if PIP was manufactured and made available to a wide audience. Just think how badly it would affect procrastinators; as one myself I shudder to think how little I would achieve with PIP at work in my brain.

Even if such an invention was destined to hit the media market in the future, I doubt the majority of people would misuse it to the imaginative degree that I could hypothesize. If anything, the more pressing matter at hand and for the future is the worrying level of volume I persist to listen to my music at. While I'm abundantly aware of the long-term risks to my sense of hearing, I can't help but subject my war-torn eardrums to the boisterous beats and tantalising tunes hammering forth from my headphones. I suppose if I'm still capable of hearing the piercing whine of the fire alarm when I'm in my regal 60s I'll count myself lucky. For now I will continue to enjoy the control I have over my airspace and worship my iPod Touch, which I fondly dubbed The Quatro, because it's just that awesome!