Pillows with built-in speakers aim to make listening while snoozing a more comfortable experience

We’ve all been there: You want to listen to music while lying down for a nap, or perhaps while you go to sleep, but the act of wearing headphones or earbuds while putting your head on the pillow is uncomfortable. Add in the wires that you can get tangled in during your snooze, and music listening while using a pillow soon becomes more hassle than its worth.

There are a number of new product designs that may be coming to market, however, that could make this first world problem an issue no more.

The pillow designs, shown at Hometone, range from the corny (a boombox-shaped pillow complete with 1980′s-style image of a sound equalizer) to the cute (a pillow that looks like a penguin with a speaker as the nose), to the “why didn’t I think of that?” (the airplane travel-style neck pillow with speakers embedded, pictured above).

The speakers in almost all of these designs are self-powered, so that means you wouldn’t be getting the best sound quality ever out of the pillows, but it also means there’d be no need for batteries in the pillows to make things clunkier and lumpier than they need to be. One would think, however, that the key to effectively putting speakers in a pillow would be to make the speakers feel invisible as you lay your head on the object, as feeling your ears scratch along a piece of plastic or feeling a hard lump inside the pillow where the speaker is might make it more difficult to sleep comfortably.