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Current noise cancelling technology comes in the form of headphones and earbuds. To cancel noise, these headphones emit an anti-noise signal to contrast the external sounds. The time available for the headphones to produce this anti-noise signal is extremely short. This results in some noise getting through, which is why all these devices must cover the entire ear with noise-canceling material. However, wearing such ear-blocking devices for long periods of time is not comfortable, and can even be harmful.
"Our goal is to not block the ear canal," said Sheng Shen, lead author and a Ph.D. candidate in the Coordinated Science Laboratory and Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). "We envision a behind-the-ear device that still achieves noise cancellation as good as the best headphones or earbuds available today."
The main idea behind this research involves combining wireless IoT networks with noise cancellation. A microphone is placed in the environment that senses sounds and sends them over wireless signals to an earpiece. Since wireless signals travel a million times faster than sound, the earphone can receive the sound information much faster than the actual sound itself.
Source: Method to cancel noise without ear-blocking headphones
(Score: 3, Informative) by qzm on Sunday August 26 2018, @10:15AM (1 child)
Its much MUCH worse than that - to the point I have to wonder if they actually understand their claimed area.
Sound is changed hugely by the environment it is in, and passes through. It reflects, it cross-interacts due to the non-linearity of air, it refracts through grating effects, and what you finally hear is dependent on the direction it arrives at your ear..
How on earth do they hope to allow for ANY of this in such a system?
Even the basics, like knowing dir direction of the source and therefore when it will arrive at the target seems.. improbably?
Of course it can be made to work with a HUGELY simplified system - noise only coming from one specific direction, and in an acoustically dead environment - due any real use? not a damn chance.
Perhaps with sozens of microphones and GFlops of realtime analysis to work out the interactions they could make some progress, but why?
They would be much better having a microphone or two outside but close to the ear and doing much easier corrections for its relative location - and even that would not be easy.
This is just poorly thought out pie in the sky stuff - no double looking for grant money rather than any real commercial practicality.
Acoustics just dont work like this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 26 2018, @01:23PM
air is nonlinear for sound? I thought that happens at frequencies we can't hear anyway (or for shock waves, which i doubt we can cancel anyway).