A Better Way to Cancel Noise

[avcdsuia]

Here's an intro video [0] and here's the actual paper [1].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxcKkhmqXP0

[1]: https://synrg.csl.illinois.edu/papers/mute-sigcomm18.pdf

[raindropm]

That aside, I found that construction earmuff is quite good for blocking sound and gain focus — with just about 5% price of top noise canceling headphone in the market. It took a bit getting used to though(and took quite some times to 'stretch' the earmuff in order to make it not clamp too tight to your head, but it works quite well and very cheap alternative.

It looks derpy though so I can't wear it in the office — where I want to use it the most. :(

[peatmoss]

You can sometimes pair a decent in-ear pair of headphones with shooting / construction earmuffs, depending on the clearances. That’s the best of both worlds IMO. Also, don’t worry about looking derpy; I give you blanket permission to not care :-)

[finnthehuman]

It looks derpy though so I can't wear it in the office

You'll be fine. A guy in our office wears some, it's no big deal.

[jlebar]

Heh, most people think mine are headphones. The derp factor only occurs once they figure out that they're not. :)

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

Wearing it in the office - if you can get away with it - would also be a good way to make a point that the office environment is too damn loud to think.

[pragmatic]

Don't ruin your hearing.

You can't listen to music in headphones all day without damaging your hearing.

The open pit coding fad is causing an epidemic of hearing damage.

[mlevental]

the problem with these is that the tension on the spring (necessarily) is very high and they're painful to wear after a couple of hours.

[xab9]

This sounds great - can you wear glasses with it?

[Ricardus]

The MUTE solution sounds interesting, and is certainly worth some research, but I see it having some problems. One obvious one is that the receiver might stay in that guy's window, and you might be in the apartment, say 15 feet away, so within that distance you can overcome the latency issue that was mentioned (because radio waves travel faster than sound waves) but the fact remains you're 15 feet away from the microphone in the receiver, and by the time the sound reaches you, it has changed dramatically. It has reflected off of 1000 surfaces by then and looks a lot less like it did at the receiver. So creating a waveform that's 180 degrees out of phase would be a gigantic challenge. I suppose you could do some work with Impulse Responses to solve this. You could take an IR of the room where the listener is and probably account for a lot of the changes and use some DSP to modify the waveform to make it more correct. But then if you move somewhere else in the room, everything changes and needs to be recalculated. Interesting idea though.

[randyt]

The solution is to use adaptive filtering.

[tedunangst]

The description was rather vague, but seemingly equivalent to a pair of bose headphones with the microphone extended out a few feet in the direction of noise to allow more time to calculate the antiwave?

[gnicholas]

Yeah, except of course there are reflections from all over the place, so just extending it out in one direction wouldn't solve the problem. I think this is what the reference to IOT was all about — if you had a few sensors in the room, then you could do a better job of this.

I've wondered if a HomePod or two could do this — I understand they are currently able to discern a very quiet "hey Siri" (even when playing loud music), due to their spatial awareness. Of course, the HomePod would also need to know where the listener(s) is located in order to cancel the noise.

[anonu]

I live in NYC and I'm a longtime user of the Bose QC20s. They are probably the best commercial noise cancellation devices. I even sleep with them. The article promises some significant leaps in the technology. No doubt as processing gets faster and smaller we'll have even smarter noise cancellation. Looking forward to that...

[odiroot]

Can't they stop human voice, music and children crying?

These three are literally the only things I want to filter out while I'm focusing.

[therein]

> I even sleep with them

I used to do that with my QC15 first and then after it broke twice, with my QC25 replacement. Sleeping with them on is really tough on them, though. After the third replacement device, I decided I couldn't keep on doing it no matter how much I actually enjoyed putting it on at night and hear that soft static. The slight pressure actually felt pleasant.

Quitting using them for sleep was hard, though. I certainly felt the urge to buy a new pair but now I sleep with a pillow on my head if I'm sleeping on my side, or a puffier pillow put sideways under my head positioned in a way that it will cover my ears if I am sleeping on my back. It is no perfect replacement but I think the reason why I do that is because I am still seeking that QC20 feel.

[steve19]

I completely agree. My QC20s are probably hands down the best electronics purchase I have made. A gadget that has significantly increased my quality of life, and they last a long time.

[kardos]

Someone needs to invent an expanding foam that you spray in your ear and it solidifies in a few moments to form a perfect seal. It needs to somehow not go too deep and cause problems, and be easy to pull out and discard afterwards, ie, you can sell it forever like razor blades. Bonus points if it's biodegradable and can go in the compost.

[mikhailfranco]

Why would you want to take it out?

Perfect at work.

Perfect at the bar on the way home, to protect against the pub bore.

Perfect at home for the wife & babies, and a few years later ...

Perfect immunity from the acoustically-lethal menopausal wife & teens combo.

[kachurovskiy]

I have some of the best noise cancelling headphones (Sony MDR-1000X) and the thing few people realize is that active noise cancellation actually increases perceived pressure on your ear. For me it's like being underwater. I'm only really using them while flying.

[jmiserez]

I had both the MDR-1000XM2 and the Bose QC25, and the QC25 actually feel more like underpressure. I don’t think feeling overpressure is inherent to noise cancelling. I suggest you try out the QC25/35 in a store and see if they feel different to your ears.

[burlesona]

Yep, same headphones and I get the same sensation. It doesn’t bother me too much but when it’s not too noisy I leave the noise canceling turned off for that reason.

[Izmaki]

To me canceling headphones are only useful if I don't have a migraine. If I do have one and I try to use noise cancelling headphones, it feels like my head is spinning in circles and is about to blow up. Removing sound will for me always be better than combating noise.

[p1mrx]

It seems like this would require an array of microphones, plus knowledge of the user's location, mushed together into a model of the environment. Like MIMO for sound.

[keyrob32]

Completely agree. With only one microphone placed somewhere around the cubicle it would not be able to detect the direction the sound is coming from. In worst case the sound wave reach you before the microphone... Also in order to create the perfect anti wave the distance between you and the microphone has to be known really well. I think this is actually one of the huge advantages of wearable noise canceling headphones.

[puranjay]

If this device truly did exist in the marketplace, I would pay a very good price for it.

[twtw]

i dream of cars with an array of speakers around the wheels to cancel the road noise.

[mikhailfranco]

The multi-channel case of using many anti-noise generators is much more complex than a simple single-channel.

I once proved a nice theorem about the multi-channel case, using Lagrangian multipliers and the theory of Gershgorin disks, which are what you get if someone upsets a Tower of Hanoi game all over your complex plane:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gershgorin_circle_theorem

[wumms]

Assuming road noise is nowadays mostly low frequency noise - BOSE's car suspension [0] might do the trick: "It does for motion what noise-cancelling does for noise" [1].

[0] https://youtu.be/3KPYIaks1UY

[1] https://www.clearmotion.com

[t0mbstone]

So... There's a concept, but no actual product. Got it.

[randyt]

They built a prototype to verify the idea. No product yet.

[ape4]

But a cool idea

[tamersalama]

I hate white noise and It bugs me a lot in current office settings (theory is that my brain is trying to make sense of what's thrown at it).

Isn't anti-noise signal, in itself, a noise? Whether or not it perfectly matches the noise signal or lags behind. Wouldn't that be more patterns that the brain would try to make sense of.

[anmorgan]

It would not be more signal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_interference

The goal of noise canceling is to fully use destructive wave interference to create a 0 amplitude "signal", which is no signal at all.

[tedunangst]

The point of antinoise is that the pattern is erased. The air is still.