Headphones to eliminate external sound except the closest one

Imagine you’re doing office work in a noisy place and you’re wearing noise-canceling headphones to muffle ambient chatter. A coworker comes to your table and asks you a question, but instead of having to take off your headphones and say “What?”, you hear the question clearly. Meanwhile, the chatter from the rest of the venue remains silent to your ears thanks to selective noise cancellation. Another situation of the same type: You are in a very busy restaurant, but you hear perfectly the people sitting at your table with whom you are eating and chatting, while you barely hear the chatter of the rest of the people in the restaurant, even though this chatter is louder than the conversation with your table mates.

Researchers have created headphones, for now only in the prototype phase, that allow the user to create precisely that “sound bubble.” The headphones use artificial intelligence algorithms prepared by the research and development team to allow the user to hear people speaking within a bubble with a programmable radius of approximately 1 to 2 meters.

Voices and other sounds from outside the bubble are mitigated by an average of 49 decibels (about the difference between the noise of a vacuum cleaner running and rustling leaves), even though distant sounds are louder than those inside the bubble. bubble.

The team responsible for this technological advance was led by Tuochao Chen, from the University of Washington in the American city of Seattle.

These researchers created the prototype from normal anti-noise headphones, available on the market. They placed six small microphones on the headband. The team’s neural network, which runs on a small computer built into the headphones, detects when different sounds reach each microphone. The system then suppresses the sounds coming from outside the bubble, but reproduces, slightly amplified, those from inside.

The prototype of headphones with artificial intelligence that muffles the sound of the environment except very close to the user, to allow them to follow a conversation and at the same time get rid of background noise. (Photo: Chen et al. / Nature Electronics)

Tuochao Chen and his colleagues present the technical details of their innovation in the academic journal Nature Electronics, under the title “Hearable devices with sound bubbles.” (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)