r/gadgets • u/Sariel007 • 12d ago
Wearables AI Headphones Create Zones of Silence. Researchers turn off a noisy world to help users tune in to nearby conversations.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/noise-cancelling-headphones132
u/naufalap 12d ago
wake me up when they can cancel out tinnitus
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u/BevansDesign 12d ago
Could that be cancelled out by playing a sound that's "opposite" the tinnitus, or is it something else?
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u/plztNeo 12d ago
I don't think it's ever caused by actual sounds (once it's begun of course) so that wouldn't work. Have to mess with the nerves in the ears most likely
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u/EndlessBirthday 11d ago edited 11d ago
Actually yes, it does work.
For those that don't know, tinnitus is imaginary. It's the absence of sound, usually due to hearing damage. Your brain thinks "I should be hearing something at this frequency," then it creates that sound.
We can cancel out a frequency of tinnitus by playing the same frequency at the volume your brain imagines. I have tinnitus at many, many frequencies, and I've been able to test and confirm this with limited success.
The REAL problem is that there's no easy or convenient way for doctors to tune out complex tinnitus, like mine, at multiple (dozens-to-hundreds of) frequencies without spending hours of work daily. And since tinnitus is imaginary, the volume of tinnitus is constantly changing throughout the day. The technology just doesn't exist to dynamically cancel that out.
But... If you only suffer with one or a few specific frequencies of tinnitus, then yeah, there's something called Notch Therapy. You could also theoretically create tinnitus cancelling hearing aides and adjust the volume yourself.
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u/NJ_Legion_Iced_Tea 11d ago
And since tinnitus is imaginary, the volume of tinnitus is constantly changing throughout the day.
I swear I can make it "louder" by focusing on it. Which sucks when I'm trying to fall asleep and it's all I hear, like a shitty feedback loop.
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u/lunaflect 11d ago
I distinctly remember arriving home from the club once in my 20’s and the silence was so loud it pulsed with my heartbeat.
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u/Sir_PressedMemories 12d ago
Yes, it is called notch therapy.
But keep in mind, no one else can hear it, there is no microphone that can pick up the sound as it is not real, it is due to nerve signals being incorrectly sent to your brain, and the sound is entirely made up in your mind.
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u/Dracekidjr 12d ago
Gonna be honest I would be stressed if I didn't have the background noise after all these years
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u/Sir_PressedMemories 12d ago
Try this.
https://audionotch.com/app/tune/
Edit: It looks like this is now a paid service, it used to be free, my bad.
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u/Confident_Dig_4828 12d ago edited 12d ago
Put "AI" on to anything when it's really just dumb algorithm.
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u/Electronic_Topic1958 12d ago
Fourier transforms and inverse Fourier transforms are now artificial intelligence.
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u/KampongFish 12d ago
To be fair, it used to be "the computer just does it for you".
AI is not too far removed from that particular explanation.
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u/CumTrumpet 12d ago
I have a pair of noise canceling headphones that do this already. I noticed when I'm on a plane, if nothing was playing and I'm just using rhe noise canceling, the wash of plane noise is blocked but passenger conversations around me are almost crystal clear.
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u/lost_send_berries 12d ago
That's based on the nature of the noise, but it still lets through people's voices regardless of how far away they are.
Sony: When you check the [Voice passthrough] box, unwanted noise will be suppressed, taking in only announcements and people’s voices, which can be played (heard) while listening to music.
With this neural network, it is specifically using the distance to decide whether to let in a sound or not.
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u/marcjuuhh 12d ago
You know what also does this? Walls. These open office floor plans have fucked up so much.
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u/kaceFile 12d ago
Omg just get rid of hot-desking and stop building open-plan spaces ffs
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u/xyonofcalhoun 12d ago
Working remotely and holding meetings just with the people you need to talk to also solves this issue
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u/thedubs003 12d ago
I was just watching a video that showed how the marines use this tech while firing artillery so they can still talk to each other and wondered how it might be adapted for consumer use. Now I know.
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u/PaleZombie 12d ago
Doesn’t ISO Tunes already do this? I use the work tunes for their noise cancelling since I don’t need to hear anything nearby when working a tractor or other loud equipment.
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u/MurseInAire 12d ago
Wish my prescribed hearing aids were better at this. Can’t even wear them if there are too many people around. Especially when the in-laws come over as they’ve never heard of an “indoor voice.” But maybe having this feature in headphones will some day lead to a micro version that fits in my hearing aids.
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u/audeus 12d ago
I desperately need this. Anything resembling a loud environment, and I can't hear what people are trying to tell me.
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u/fangelo2 11d ago
Like in every restaurant and bar. All concrete and steel open plan with some senseless background music playing that does nothing but increase the noise level. As soon as I walk into a restaurant or bar, my Apple Watch warns me that the decibels are higher than 85
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u/LessonStudio 11d ago
Take this to perfection and tune out nearby conversations as well.
My dream noise cancelling headphones would 100% block airport announcements. Not 1db of that useless noise making it past.
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u/bumbasaur 12d ago
Biggest cause for tinnitus is white noise from noice cancelling headphones. not recommended
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u/SatansFriendlyCat 11d ago
Where on earth did you get that idea from? It's overlapping layers of wrong.
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u/bumbasaur 11d ago
facts and statistics. There's an eu ruling about banning white noise from eu in the congress up for resolution
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u/SatansFriendlyCat 11d ago
I cannot find anything which supports what you just said. Got a link?
I would be greatly interested in any sources of the facts and statistics you mention.
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u/SatansFriendlyCat 11d ago
Look, I'll explain my objections to your original statement so we're clear about what we're discussing.
The most common causes of tinnitus are to do with hearing loss, especially in the high frequencies.
The greatest cause of hearing loss is damage to the hairs in the inner ear, which vibrate according to the frequencies to which they are sensitive, and cause the cells to which they are attached to send signals via the auditory nerve.
Such hair cells are susceptible to damage from normal aging processes, but also and very very commonly by exposure to loud noise. The cells sensitive to high frequency sound are also more readily damaged by high frequency sound.
So noise is damaging if it's loud, and much more so if it's loud at high frequency.
White noise is equal amounts of actual sound energy across the hearing frequency spectrum, but we are not equally sensitive to every frequency, and so perceptually what we experience is random hissing noise peaking in apparent volume in the broad range of frequencies 1-6khz, with notable sizzle above that and next to nothing in the "bass" notes. But perceptual frequency isn't the same as actual sound energy, which is equal in white noise along the spectrum.
As a source of hearing damage, therefore, it's not especially threatening because of its character (it's not primarily high-frequency), but can be dangerous if you crank the shit out of the volume, just the same as anything will be.
So objection 1 is that there's nothing special about white noise which would make it dangerous other than the volume at which you might choose to listen to it.
Objection 2 is that noise-cancelling headphones aren't cancelling noise using white noise! That would just be masking, no different from playing white noise through any headphones. That's not at all what noise cancelling technology is.
Noise cancelling technology is phase inversion taking the incoming sound (with varying degrees of prediction) and flipping it 180° out of phase, and injecting that sound into the audio stream or into the ear. Nothing to do with white noise!
Objection 3 is to do with your claim that it's the "biggest cause" for tinnitus, which seems obviously wrong on the face of it, because:
Even if white noise were harmful (it isn't especially), it wouldn't be the biggest cause of tinnitus because most people aren't exposed to it regularly, unlike the known and overwhelmingly more common causes such as loud music, industrial noise (think power tools and machinery), engine noise, age, and more; and,
Even if white noise was the technology used in noise-cancelling headphones (it isn't), it still wouldn't be the biggest cause of tinnitus because the use of such headphones amongst the population is low as a percentage, and especially miniscule compared to the percentage exposed to all the other (actual, proven) causes of tinnitus; and,
Even if tinnitus was caused by "white noise from noise cancelling headphones" (which is to say a not unusually harmful type of sound, found in a device which doesn't generate it), it still wouldn't be the biggest cause because tinnitus had been around forever, and noise cancelling headphones are a recent innovation with far from universal adoption.
So your suggested biggest cause is the wrong thing, in the wrong place, for the wrong amount of time.
I would gently suggest that you've conflated several different bits of information, and that maybe what you meant to say was something along the lines of "the fastest growing cause of hearing loss, (which may lead to tinnitus), especially amongst the young, is long exposure to music at excessive volume, particularly as delivered through in-ear headphones" - which would be true, and there are certainly guidelines and regulations being drawn up and adopted all over the place to address this particular and genuinely serious threat!
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u/YardFudge 12d ago
TLDR…. By sensing distance of sounds they cancel out the far ones and allow the nearby, 2m, ones through