Hacker News Reader

Comment by foreigner | Hacker News Reader

I'll bet they achieve commercial success with the reverse application. Imagine being able to mute that one obnoxiously loud person with an annoying voice at a party!

View on HN

For something that you could actually sell in volume, you may not be thinking large enough in terms of "party".

It's common to wear ear plugs at concerts, to avoid destroying your ears. Not imagine replacing those ear plugs with in-ear headphones that filter everything except your family/friends and the concert, while regulating the volume (if your SO talks to you make that one voice loud over the rest), maybe keep the "crowd noise" going with the flow but remove normal conversations for people around, etc ...

I'm not in ML/AI/etc ... At all but my understanding is that none of that is actually impossible with current tech ? Sure the battery and power limits exists, but this is a concert those headphone with a "band" going behind your head to keep them in place / not lose them if it falls makes sense. Would need some training for "your voice" but if alexa can do it in 10 seconds then a phone app can do that too.

Hell, if it existed for movies theater at below 200€ I would probably buy one right now and maybe go to the movies again.

I'm into AI but not into sound, so I might be saying something stupid here, but I think using something like this for very high volume like concerts would be possibly outright impossible, but, even if not, certainly quite dangerous and therefore not commercializable.

My understanding is that to "mute" a sound, you need to inject another wave that is exactly the opposite, with the exact same volume and in perfect sync, so that the two waves interfere destructively. However, in general but especially in AI, you can never guarantee 100% accuracy. If you use this technology to "silence" a background fountain, and something goes wrong, at worst you get a lot of noise that make you grimace and remove them. If at a concert with 100+ dB of music you get an error and your headphones start producing a similarly loud, but not perfectly aligned noise right into your ears, you probably won't have the time to remove them before damaging your hearing system.

In general, I think that having a tool that drives 100+ dB straight into your head is probably not a wise idea :-)

It probably wouldn't work for in-ear setups. However, I'd you have over the ear headphones with good passive noise canceling (35db) then you would need less of the active canceling (65db) to make it quiet and safe.

You can get earplugs with ~30 dB reduction and builtin in-ear monitors. Slap some microphones and such on the outside, and you can probably work with it.

You could probably achieve the same outcome by combining two approaches though. Use traditional timing and phase management that existing noise cancelling headphones do. Then, using the data from that same set of microphones use AI to extract the conversation of interest (maybe using timing differences from left/right to determine who's "in front" of you) and inject that as the thing to overlay on top of the inversion. This way there's no risk of AI error on the noise cancellation and you can rely on existing solutions.

Even putting 50db of sound in the opposite direction might help take something from the volume of a nightclub to the volume of a refrigerator [1]. Not perfectly muting it, but perhaps good enough for many scenarios.

Disclaimer - I also have no technical experience of sound

[1] Going by the sounds levels in this post: https://lexiehearing.com/us/library/decibel-examples-noise-l...

> I'm not in ML/AI/etc ... At all but my understanding is that none of that is actually impossible with current tech?

Over 4 years ago nvidia released a feature that lets you remove arbitrary background noise in real-time.

Here's a video where a guy put a fan, vacuum cleaner and leaf blower right next to his microphone: https://youtu.be/Q-mETIjcIV0?t=535

It definitely chopped out a bunch of his natural frequency but it was clear enough to hear him without issues. Earlier in the video he did more normal tests like removing the sound of his keyboard in which case his voice's frequencies were mostly left untouched. He also banged a hammer on his desk while talking.

i have an Asus microphone adapter which does this noise cancelling in the dongle. It was marketed as "AI" but i'm sure it's just fancy DSP in the ADC onboard. i use it with a $5 no-name clip on lav mic.

I don't sound fantastic on it, but i sound better than people using cellphone microphones and thrift store microphones. It also works if i talk loudly from another room, but won't pick up normal volume conversations in the same room, which means there's a noise gate in there, too.

I've heard a very abrasive sneeze sounds like "chew!", like a cartoon sneeze or something. I couldn't tell the difference in a blind test between a cellphone's noise cancelling with the sound recorder and the asus device vis a vis overall quality, but the gating on the asus is more aggressive. It also works better than the default discord noise reduction, but is about equal to the Krisp (iirc) implementation. Its gate is faster than discord if you have both krisp and the normal noise cancelling on.

I think they're discontinued. If i ever see one in the wild i'll be sure and buy it. I have never tried it with a decent microphone - and i do have a couple, including shure and marantz - because there's no need. I wouldn't use it for podcasting or doing anything where the overall quality would be noticed; but for discord / in game / PC telephony it works great.

It seems like this kind of thing could be technically feasible but the idea that people would use it to block the world out over a few inconveniences seems kind of depressing to me. Sometimes you end up making a friend simply because you found the conversation next you interesting.

Like others in this thread are saying, though, it would be an incredible boon for people who use hearing aids.

Being able to selectively mute people was an element in a couple of Black Mirror episodes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror)

I think this is the wildest “I guess I’m” old moment I’ve experienced… Do people wear headphones at parties?

No?

Not unless it’s a silent disco or you’re the DJ.

People (well, teenagers) wil.wear headphones to the dinner table if you let them.

That makes much more sense than wearing them at the party.

I guess you’re not old enough. This sounds like a feature for hearing aids.

When you’re old you can just turn them off entirely. Who’s you got talking to you at a party you want to hear anyway?

Folks who are hearing impaired do. And that's increasingly more of us as we age.

I know a few people on the spectrum using ANR headphones or earbuds in social or loud settings (party/bar/restaurant/subway) to lower the ambient noise, just as you would wear a pear of sunglasses in the sun or on a brightly-lit stage. To them, it is a welcome fix to the alternative they had before: be exhausted by the stimulation, or stay home. The tendency of "the young" to do it too is a bonus: now they don't stand out so much.

That one person who laughs so loud it's painful even though I'm 15 feet away, and they laugh like 3x per minute continuously... drives me up the wall. Yeah, I'd definitely appreciate a way to tune them out!

There's also a pretty useful criminal application of listening in on people without them knowing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com