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Comment by garyfirestorm | Hacker News Reader

Ummmm. ANC attenuates certain frequencies and fails to attenuate other frequencies. Which you would end up hearing anyway if you weren’t wearing the headphones. So effectively the sound power reaching your ears didn’t change for those frequencies.

I have worked on ANC systems in automotive applications.

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theoretically. it's never going to match the input exactly though and therefore it will generate noise of its own. it's conceivable that there would be less variation in this noise, due to quantized nature of the system that synthesizes the cancellation, and that a fixed synthesized signal for long durations could exhaust parts of the cochlea that are used to the high variability of natural sounds and/or trigger an adaptation in auditory cortex.

or the software is bad or the anc mic fails, and it generates a high pitched whine that causes short term tinnitus.

just spitballing because it's fun. would be interesting to analyze the frequency responses to benchtop and realistic scenarios for anc in modern earbuds.

also would be interesting to understand the psychophysical response to those behaviors!

Thank you. I would love for someone go down this rabbit hole and see what they find. Maybe it turns out the answer is "none of the above" but these feel like productive lines of inquiry.

> Ummmm

Serious question, because I see it so often: what are these fillers meant to achieve?

Shortcut to passive aggressiveness

It wasn’t meant to come across as passive aggressive. When I make a statement that contradicts the original post, I try to be mindful and human. Instead of saying ‘you’re blatantly wrong’ I am hoping to not come across as a rude guy on internet. I’ll probably explore other ways.

:) I would, because it came across as very sarcastic to me

Replication of speech habits into text.

In this case, it signifies skepticism.

They are a attempt to replicate, in written form, the rhythm of conversation that is typically encountered when two or more people speak in person, face to face.

The "Ummmm" we see in the present example, expresses doubt in what was just said (written, really), and foreshadows that the statement to follow (from speaker #2) may be disagreeable to the other person (speaker #1).'

Similarly, it is not uncommon to find the word "Hmmm" as a preface to some statement. This expresses a notion of "I will need to think about this." But in some contexts, "Hmmm" can convey skepticism. In real-life conversation, people frequently exploit this ambiguity, as a clever way to signal that they are skeptical but will not state so out loud.

Your ears are a complex system. Just like when your eyes think it's darker, your pupils dilate, your ears have a similar method of controlling how much sound gets to the sensitive bits.

It's possible that ANC convinces your ear to open up a bit more, leading to damage in the frequencies that it doesn't attenuate.

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