Noise-canceling single-layer woven silk and cotton fabric | Hacker News Reader

Noise-canceling single-layer woven silk and cotton fabric

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

172 pointsbookofjoe114 comments

Bah. I thought this was going to be cool passive noise reduction but it’s active.

Back in the 90’s someone figured out these little hollow beads that ate sound. They talked about how we could paint them on walls to dampen whole rooms, or things like airplanes.

Since we never heard from them again, even after the patents would have expired, I suspect that they couldn’t find a binder that adhered to the beads without filling in the holes. Or the paint neutralizes the effect.

Two modes are described, one is direct acoustic interference. That one's an active mode where sound waves are cancelled out and the fabric effectively is "just" a speaker. The second is a passive method where the sound is dampened by way of sinking the current produced by the piezo fiber.

Unfortunately the passive method is not very effective at blocking sound, 75% is only about 5 dB.

Why wouldn't you just quilt them up in lots of pockets and then attach them like wall paper?

Those sound similar to maybe SiLibeads? Which are widely deployed into factories but doesn't real turn up in more daily spaces.

> Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties.

This first sentence makes it seem as if the paper was written by aliens. Not even deaf people would gain anything from that sentence.

I think LLMs have caused me to be more perceptive to and annoyed by stuff like this.

My thesis supervisor used excessively flowery language like that in papers, and I had to have a few tugs with him over needless verbosity all while learning to write a paper for the first time. I think there's a subconscious "look at how wise I am" whiff that comes off this type of writing. And sure, yes, impressive, but let's leave creative writing to creative writers. As a scientist, you should instead be focusing on communicating a (probably complex enough) idea as clearly and as simply as you possibly can - just not any simpler.

By the time I wrote my thesis, I was far more assertive in politely declining many of his edits.

When I was a research fellow in anesthesiology, my supervisor constantly made edits that seemed to me unnecessary, almost as if he felt it was required of him to demonstrate his mastery.

After he changed something I'd revised per his instructions back to my original copy I decided I'd had enough: I revised only where I thought it improved the papers and ignored the rest.

He never said a thing.

> my supervisor constantly made edits that seemed to me unnecessary, almost as if he felt it was required of him to demonstrate his mastery.

There are many stories of savvy workers engaging proactively including a flaw in their work being reviewed, something small but obvious and easy to fix, so that their managers can feel involved. One that often comes up in software is an apocryphal "duck" in an unreleased attack animation for the queen-unit in Interplay's Battle Chess game.

Closely related are the appearance of changes, such as a tale that Michelangelo was pressured to "fix" the nose of his David statue, so he climbed up and knocked off a little bit of material and the superior down below was satisfied without being able to verify anything had really changed.

Also known as the hairy arm technique or a revision bait.

http://www.1099.com/c/co/in/insanity006.html

I wrote an article for an early Java dev website thinking I might do that more professionally. I don’t know what crawled up the editor’s butt, but he kept suggesting edits that took sentences I sweated over to be precise and basically edited them to say either nothing at all or the opposite of what I meant. My last round of edits I sent to him came with my own comments about why things needed to stay worded a certain way, because I thought he was trying to make me sound like an idiot - not plain-speaking but plain wrong.

It was exhausting and stupid and I stuck to blogging after that. Who knows, I might have written books. But not dealing with shit like that. I can torture myself much more efficiently, TYVM.

self-publishing books... just sayin

I was always on the fence about whether I had enough to say to fill a book. It's more that the experience made me stop asking the question.

My English professors in college beat this kind of stuff out of the students. One went so far as to grade all papers that started with something like "since time immemorial, man has..." with an F.

The issue here is not so much that it’s flowery but that it’s completely unremarkable, bordering on a truism, in its content. The sentence literally means: sound is relevant because you constantly hear it.

The sentence is badly written, which is why it feels like a truism. But there is content in it.

> Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, ...

Sounds are always being heard by your senses: ears + bass that you feel in your body.

> Sound ... continually engages our auditory and mental faculties.

The continuous usage of our senses then lets sounds force our brains to think in particular ways. This is distinct from above - brain vs ears.

> Sound ... holds significant relevance in the human experience ...

The continuous engagement results in sound being important to what being human means. Note that human experience is larger than what you think. So this is also distinct from above.

I’m sorry but you have taken a lot of words to basically say: you hear sounds.

Special mention to “ Sound ... holds significant relevance in the human experience” which is itself a truism in the truism. Yes, sound is an experience and experiencing is a significant part of being alive. You are welcome for this insanely new and deep nugget of information.

Honestly, you can remove the first paragraph of the introduction with no loss of information involved and end up with a better article.

I spent years implementing natural language processing papers and I learned to my incredible dismay most of them are incredibly simple and do their level best to hide this by writing the most impenetrable prose you can find. Sometimes I sincerely miss being a child and believing most people are doing their best and aren't fundamentally kind of shit.

Given the obsequious near limitless tolerance we extend to operators of loud ICE engines in the public realm, I don't think this is nearly stressed enough.

I'm seriously considering moving because I live near an interstate. By near, I mean about a mile away, but the trucks with the straight pipe exhausts that engine brake drive me _bonkers_. On top of those, the sound just carries sometimes. I can't see the highway from my house, so it's not a line-of-sight thing, just acoustics.

I've started recording the outdoor sound levels using a USB sound meter: https://i.imgur.com/IdYdhA8.png

When the quietest it gets is above 55 decibels, I don't like being outside. It's not just cars passing by, it is a pulsating drone which never ends.

I moved from the city to the beach a little over a year ago, and though the sound of the waves is roughly the same level as the city’s car drone was, it being a natural sound made a huge difference in my sleep quality and overall comfort.

It makes me wonder if the noise profile that cars make could be modified to be less annoying, even if not necessarily less loud.

I would love to hear the crash of the ocean 24x7. The highway noise bothers me because of the echoing nature of it. It's not uni-directional, and it feels like there's always a vehicle coming at me.

My youngest has one more year of high school remaining, but maybe it's time to downsize / find a quieter place after she graduates.

Cars are extremely noisy, and it's so hard to predict how loud any given address is without actually living there for a while... Beyond the obvious reasons anyway.

My current address would be perfectly fine if people drove according to the rules, but it turns out that people in this town don't adhere to speed limits whatsoever and there is literally no police control.

Consequently, the 50km/h speed limit is ignored entirely with most cars driving around 70km/h.

That shit gets loud!

I have the same problem. The difference on a snowday e.g. is night and day. no speeders, so much more quiet.

Two of my neighbors on our block bought electrical cars, and not exaggerating, it made such a difference to quality of life, no longer hearing them pull up or drive off.

I lived in a "walkable city" for a number of years. The noise outside my window was all human. Footsteps, people talking, ... At night was dead quiet. Much more quiet than the suburban street I'm on now.

City life is not inherently shitty, it's tolerance for antisocial behaviors that make it shitty. I really think americans can't always put their finger on it, and end up moving out at some point, thinking it has to do with the overall "busyness" of city life or something. But it really is just noisy cars.

In my case the area has become a haven for warehouses, and large (18-wheel) truck traffic is up 90% in the last few years alone. I've lived here for over 20 years, and it's hard to see it change like this.

I entirely agree that there is substantial tolerance for vehicle noise tolerance and this drives me crazy. Cities aren't loud, cars are! I just want to make clear though that replacing the ICE part with electric engines solves the problem for low speeds only -- once they're going at a reasonable speed, engine noise doesn't dominate (if you exclude the antisocial behaviors of deliberately loud vehicles, most motorbikes).

I sometimes miss the constant din of the city, I have heard nothing but wind and waves for the past week and those are louder than any densely populated area I have lived in. Now that they have settled down the crows can hear each other so they have been at it all day. When it actually gets quiet is when I miss the city the most, I like the quiet but every noise breaks that silence which demands your attention making it difficult to concentrate on anything. It is now below freezing and everything green is gone, everything is getting hard and that is when things really get loud here, nothing to absorb sound but plenty to reflect it. Nature is pretty noisy for the most part, while it seems quiet compared to the city it is actually just different.

Sometimes when it is quiet here I wonder what the noises of nature must have been like to people a century or two or three ago when the wind was not just wind but something which could destroy your crops and make the next year very difficult for you. Or the extended lack of noise constantly reminding you that the drought continues and even the animals have had the sense to move on while you watch your fields slowly die. City or nature our relationship to the sounds around us have changed quite a bit, we can now choose to ignore the majority of sounds and write them off as meaningless or irritating if we can not manage to ignore them but those sounds are never meaningless, they all signify something more than our irritation.

Right now I am missing the wind and the waves and feeling the constant low rumble, I really hate listening to the compressor on the fridge but if it stopped making noise I would probably be more irritated by the thought of spoiling food and the potential inconveniences which that would cause. Never could hear my fridge when I lived in the city, if it stopped working it would just be an issue to deal with when I discovered it was no longer cold, not something I had a constant reminder of.

It's interesting that you didn't once mention the sound of humans. Background human noise, where you can't catch the words, is very nice to hear.

I love the constant din of cities, but the din of people. Not the din of cars. If one is lucky enough to live in that sort of city.

>It's interesting that you didn't once mention the sound of humans.

I think they are implied by the din of the city which is the din of people even if it comes from a loud car, that loud car is loud because of a person. For the driver of that loud car being able to really hear the engine could mean the driver is the sort of person who wants to hear the engine and is the sort who can isolate each and every sound the engine makes telling them a great deal about how well it is or is not working. Or their engine might be about to fail and it is a constant reminder of another thing they need to figure out how to pay for and praying it holds out until next month when they get their Christmas bonus even if that means the kids will have not have much of a Christmas. Or it might just be that it is their way to block out the constant din of the city. Or they may just want the city know that they are there, that they exist. screaming to the heavens as it were.

All those sounds which make up the din of the city have meanings and are personal, they connect to a person and a life. But I did make a conscious decision between natural and unnatural noise, nature vs city, people are sort of a grey area there and getting into that would complicate my point. The person living out in middle of nowhere miles from anyone is generally allowed to make as much noise as they please unless you happen to be camping near their property, then they are probably going to be considered rude for disturbing the tranquility and your vacation from the city even though you are the one encroaching on their life, not the other way around. As far as you know no one lives within 100 miles of your campsite and here are all these noises which do not belong 100 miles from civilization.

> Nature is pretty noisy for the most part, while it seems quiet compared to the city it is actually just different.

Variation. In countryside, a cow mooing or a rooster whatevering will quite reliably wake one up. In suburbs, a car passing by will annoy the shit out of you watching a movie. In a city, one does not even notice emergency services passing by with sirens blaring.

In a countryside noise floor is so low you can hear leaves falling. In a city noise floor is the cars passing by and we adjust to that.

To add to that, public transport based on trains is and always will be a source of noise, even if they are purely electrical

That depends entirely on the tracks, and the wheel(sets) of the trains, though.

No matter if streetcars/trams downtown, or so called 'light-rail'/fast-rapid-mass-transit reaching out into the periphery, or neighbouring towns.

They can also be buried by applying that strange concept called 'subway'.

Hrrm, what happened to all those hyped loops, btw?

i'd trade the predictable rumble of a train a couple of hours a day over the unpredictable roar and rumble of trucks and muscle cars.

...and Harley Fucking Davidson motorcycles.

Cars aren't loud; commercial vehicles are. (Relatively) So are motorcycles, and food truck generators.

The illegal street racing near me says otherwise.

You can't equate "illegal street racing" to "cars". I mean you can but how is that going to address anything?

If I am walking down the street, listening to something on my earphones, I inevitably have to pause/rewind if a non-commerical car is passing by.

I could maybe get headphones, or some noise cancelling earphones, but I shouldn't have to.

Valid; I should have clarified. This is a matter of degree, not kind.

Commercial vehicles are much louder than cars. Especially at the lower speeds where engine noise dominates tire noise.

Are pickup trucks "commercial vehicles"? Either way there's plenty of them in residential areas, revving up at 5am or rumbling home in the dead of night.

They really don't need to be, but jerks sometimes do modify them to be loud even when idling. About five years ago I lived in a neighborhood where some jackass would idle his modified truck every morning at a quarter till 5am. He'd leave around 5am and you could hear the truck for at least a minute as he left the neighborhood and started accelerating hard on the highway. His house was across the street and four doors down and his truck still could be heard through my bedroom window which faced the backyard. I don't know how his next door neighbors tolerated it. This was an exurban area with lots of pickups and even a few commercial vehicles in the neighborhood but he was the only one whose vehicle was loud and it obviously was made that way intentionally.

No; they do not have the loud engines I referred to.

You've obviously never been passed by a straight piped Dodge Ram while riding a bike.

The Mustang that parks my street and operates 100% of the time in Sport Mode is the loudest vehicle I hear on a regular basis.

I will update this: Y'all have valid points regarding cars making noise:

Non-modified personal vehicles are significantly less loud than commercial vehicles, motorcycles, and food truck generators.

Some care are loud. Especially those modded exhausts.

At low speeds new cars are required to make a sound for safety reasons.

Writing like this makes me sigh, exhaling air, the omnipresent chemical stimulator, which holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our biological and mental faculties.

I think your sentence demonstrates the difference between trying to fake "sounding smart" and just writing in a complex way.

Like seriously, "[exhaling air] continually engages our [...] mental faculties" is pretty nonsensical, since breathing is something autonomic. "Omnipresent chemical simulator" seems irrelavent in context. All in all, its a nonsense sentence

Now compare with the original sentence. Its an introduction to the paper. They are trying to establish why they are doing the research they are doing and why you should care. And it tells you - we did research into sound dapening because sound is all around us and its constantly effecting us. Which is something as a human i find to be true - the modern (urban) world is quite noisy. When there is too much noise it can be mentally exhausting and can tax my ability to understand those around me. After reading that sentence I now know why they are researching this area, and agree it is a worthy thing to research. That introductory sentence did everything an introductory sentence to a paper is supposed to do.

Sure, they use some fancy words, but they aren't even that fancy. It is a formal paper, i think high school level reading ability can be presumed.

The opening sentence isn't "complex" or "fancy" writing. It's LLM writing.

The paper has: "Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties." This is just a sentence stuffed with adjectives. It conveys nothing beyond the definition of sound in a bunch of adjectives.

Complex (and admittedly annoying) writing would be something like: "Ever-cognizable and in continual interplay with our auditory faculties, sound is one of the most significant objects of human sense perception." This is annoying writing for sure, but it's well-constructed, unlike the LLM opener for the paper. It culminates with the fact that sound is important because it is ubiquitous to our perception.

"Fancy" writing would be a little more poetic, something like: "As stimulating as it is pervasive, as significant to the human experience as it is mundane, sound relentlessly occupies our sensory and mental perception: whether significant or inconsequential, substantial or infinitesimal, sound is all at once the vehicle of our heritage, the body of our cognitive terroir, and the symbol of our highest arts." This sentence is also annoying, but only because it's kind of pretentious. But there is a point here: sound is powerful to human beings.

I think the problem with our times is that people cannot tell the difference between complex writing, poetic writing, and just plain adjective-stuffed LLM writing. Which all comes down to the fact that we as a culture have devalued complex writing. Complex writing isn't read in schools, nor taught at any level of schooling. It's actually disencouraged in every Freshman writing class.

Although no hat populates my head, I take off my hat to you, while jealously cursing your cunning wielding of the English language, my good sir.

I strongly disagree. The example sentences you give would be very out of place in a scientific paper. If i saw them there i would assume an LLM wrote them because they are inapproiate to the genere of writing and LLMs sometimes have trouble with that type of context.

Writing is all about context. What is a good sentence in one context might be a terrible sentence in another context.

To go in more detail > The paper has: "Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties." This is just a sentence stuffed with adjectives. It conveys nothing beyond the definition of sound in a bunch of adjectives.

That sentence doesn't say anything about the definition of sound at all. It makes 2 claims that are important - sound is everywhere and sound affects people. Neither of them have anything to do with what sound is. I imagine the author (correctly) assumes the target audience already knows the definition of "sound".

> Complex (and admittedly annoying) writing would be something like: "Ever-cognizable and in continual interplay with our auditory faculties, sound is one of the most significant objects of human sense perception." This is annoying writing for sure, but it's well-constructed, unlike the LLM opener for the paper. It culminates with the fact that sound is important because it is ubiquitous to our perception.

Sure, that might be a fine sentence in some other article, but why would it work here? It promotes the aside, that sound is important to humans, to the main idea. However that makes no sense in context. The author isn't writing an essay on the importance of sound. Sound being important is not the primary thing the author is trying to set up here, so why would you cumulate with that?

Re the fancy one - I would say the same thing. There are plenty of contexts where that would be a fine sentence, but this isn't one of them. It is inappropriate to the genere in question and communicates the wrong idea. Sound might be powerful but this isn't an essay on how sound is powerful.

In this case they could have just said "hearing is trivially important to most humans" without any loss of value to the paper. The purple prose seems to add nothing at all.

I agree - the motivation provides important context to the rest of the research. It helps the reader quickly parse and sort.

I took it as a play on the common meme of "You are now breathing manually." which I did find pretty funny.

That first sentence has been a totally standard way to open a research paper for at least twenty years now. (As I have seen from both publishing myself, and as a side gig, doing editing of myriad papers by non-native English speakers working in many other branches of the sciences.) A writer has to start somewhere, and that has always been a matter of social convention.

From the way that paragraph continues:

> The importance of sound is underscored by its dual nature, serving as both a vital tool for communication and a potential source of harm, exemplified by the pervasive issue of noise pollution.[1] Considered to be a public health issue by the World Health Organization, unwanted noise can have harmful health effects on people who are chronically exposed to it.[1-5] In the US alone, an estimated 145 million people are exposed to hazardous noise levels.[5] To suppress noise levels, both active and passive solutions are used.

I suspect it may be angling to funding or a journal/conference purpose or something? Without that, the rest of the paper's not really going to care about noise pollution, even if it potentially indirectly offers a way to mitigate it.

Its low on informational content, but as an introductory sentence seems fine to me.

It's very motivational. IMO, my answer to it is a sound "hell, yeah! can you help with it?"

But the way it's written is bad. The OP would have a point if the complaint was about the form, and not the contents. Whatever makes people believe they have to write papers this way (whether it's true or not) needs fixing.

Yeah I kinda liked it. It made me stop and listen where I was, realizing all the weird noises happening around me that I was mentally trying to cancel out.

"Sound is everywhere, and fills our ears and minds" doesnt quite have the same PhD level ring to it (pun intended)

I enjoy having an LLM rewrite my shit posts as if it was a PhD research paper.

For papers sometimes you need to hit a page count to make your sponsor/advisor/conference happy. I've been told "this is a great paper but can you pad it out to 12pgs?", maybe that happened here as well.

How do you do, fellow humans?

It is just setting the problem space. It doesn't convey anything but a topic.

It shakes up people, reminding them how shallow their vocabulary really is.

Welcome to academia.

Apologies for the ADHD induced tangent. Has anyone else noticed that regular little party balloons seem to have a passive noise cancelling effect? If you bring them close to your ear there's a zone of 'dead air' when they are maybe an inch away. My theory was that there's something in passing through the rubber envelope that creates a phase delay or inversion, but it could just all be in my head lol.

it maybe acting as an acoustic lens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLBmWF9Xo10

edit: Steve Mould's video "I Made a Lens, But for Sound" demonstrates how balloons filled with gasses of different density than the surrounding air, act as a lens on sound waves. Helium filled balloons will scatter sound because the helium is less dense than air. He shows how a balloon filled with carbon dioxide can focus the sound.

Somebody wrote a paper on it in 2008: https://physics.byu.edu/docs/publication/644

  A balloon filled with a gas that has a different sound speed than that of air has been used as an
  acoustic lens. One purpose of the lens is to show refraction of sound waves in an analogy to
  geometric optics. We discuss the physics of the balloon lens demonstration. To determine the
  validity of a gas-filled balloon as a classroom demonstration of an acoustic lens and to understand
  the corresponding phenomena, its physics is considered analytically, numerically, and
  experimentally. Our results show that although a geometric analogy is a good first-order
  approximation, scattering theory is required to fully understand the observed phenomena. Thus this
  demonstration can be adapted to a wide range of students, from those learning the basic principles
  of refraction to advanced students studying scattering

Here's Harvard demonstrating it too: https://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/presentations/...

So would a wall of helium balloons work as a sound dampener? Or perhaps diffuser? A lot cheaper than fiberboard & foam

I doubt it would be cheaper than foam, but this is similar to gas filled windows. Argon or Krypton gas is pumped in-between the window panes to provide another layer of insulation.

Makes sense

At the old Exploratorium in the Palace of Fine Arts there was an exhibit that had a large 3-4m balloon filled with something heavy (Argon or maybe SF6?) and two points on the floor at the foci of the balloon. You could whisper at one focus and hear it easily at the other. I think it has been replaced with a more durable pair of concrete parabolic reflectors with similar effects.

Oh dang! I bet that's it! Nice find, thank you!

Do other smooth surface spherical objects have the same effect?

Sound reflects off smooth surfaces. The ballon is probably just acting like any simple physical obstruction, because the surface does a lot all by itself even if theres almost no substance.

The air inside the ballon is also at a different density than outside, without helium, because of the elastic tension in the rubber. The air inside is always slightly compressed vs outside. I have no idea how much the two densities must differ to make the accoustic lense effect. I din't think it's this, just everyone seemed to be overlooking that even plain air will also have a different density.

Density does not affect the speed of sound of a gas. Temperature and molar mass does. So increasing the pressure of a given composition of gas won’t change anything, assuming you can bring the temp back down. Helium is obviously a different molar mass. But also dry air vs moist air can have an effect.

just the humidity level in the gas used to fill a balloon is going to have a significant effect on its properties, human breath will have more c02 that air and s higher humidity. Any canned pressurised gas, will be pure with zero humidity. Heating exchange works through convection cells, the greater the number and the smaller they are, the lower covective heat transfer will happen, so filling a room with balloons, and you have made foam, and at that point the acoustical properties must be pronounced fun stuff The activity of silk working as a sound absorber is its property of bieng one of(the) best heat conductive substances, and as a basic fact, all sound is eventualy turned into heat The silk is presumably working to convert the mechanicsl motioninduced by sound into heat, quickly disapating it and releasing it to the air.

My wife makes balloon arches and I've never noticed but this sounds fascinating. Maybe I'll get her to work, for "science". :P

Note: Her balloons are not typically helium filled, so the other users question about air/helium might make a difference.

The latex from which the balloon is made is a decent soundproofing material, so what you're hearing is likely just that.

Do you see a difference regardless of helium or air? I assume from your description that it has to be inflated to work.

Helium is apparently great for soundproofing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxOzpPJbnTI (a great demonstration of sound suppressing properties of helium)

I am a light sleeper and would love to use it somehow in my bedroom, but keeping it contained is tricky.

Having filled a room with balloons, this is very noticeable. It also make heating the room difficult.

Holy cow, I read your comment and thought, "Wait, I didn't write that!" Nice to meet you, doppleganger.

heating difficult? Why would that be?

Pretty much kills convection. Each balloon is like an insulation cell.

Could it be an interaction between static electricity from the balloon and tiny elements in the ear?

im curious about replicating this

It seems like the effect would be very frequency specific.

Balloon hats for autistic and sensitive people.

Definitely

Since it’s in the zeitgeist, the piezofiber used is a pfas. It uses similar pfas materials that all lithium ion batteries utilize for safety.

We will have to wrap our heads around which pfas technology is worth it.

Talking about noise-cancelling fabric, I recently wondered:

Is it possible to noise-isolate my bed?

I live in a beautiful apartment in my favorite part of the city. But the neighbors on some nights are extremely noisy.

If I could noise-isolate my bed, that would be a huge quality of life improvement.

I was thinking about putting some noise absorbing material under the bed feet and a large noise blocking curtain over it. Like a baldachin or canopy bed.

Do you guys think that would work?

It's probably not going to be possible to completely silence your neighbors, but I'm sure there are a few things you can do to make a difference.

If noise is transmitted through the floor, add thick carpet and support your bed with a vibration deadening material, e.g. something viscoelastic. Sorbothane is popular for this but you'll need to spread the load out or pick a high durometer (stiff) rubber.

For the walls, hang up some carpets or similar, and/or hang heavy material around your bed as a canopy as you suggest. What you want is a material that's heavy enough that the energy in the sound waves is dissipated trying to move it around. Maybe a weighted blanket, or a duvet cover stuffed with mass loaded vinyl (used in cars for sound deadening).

I've looked into this before and unfortunately it is quite difficult to get good sound isolation and the answer is basically no. The really effective stuff is mass vinyl and as the name suggests it is quite heavy (and expensive). There are even some tents that musicians sometimes use for a few people to play together in a noisy environment that are hundreds of pounds without even being large enough for a bed. As I understand it, the mass is necessary for the best sound dampening. Also, once you get non-trivial sound dampening the way you let air in tends to be the easiest way for sound to get in. Even the heaviest cloth curtains would mostly help with any echos in your room rather than the initial sound itself. Maybe in some circumstances even minimal sound reduction would be helpful but you may also do a bunch of work and find it ends up making no difference.

Noise generators seem like the better way to start if you aren't using one already. I haven't tried many options but from the reviews I've seen fans are the best at this. In my experience ceiling fans do help quite a bit and there are some bedside noise generators that are fans but enclosed to limit the external air movement if the noise happens in colder weather. There are also some with speakers that play recorded fan noise, although beware of ones where the sample loops too quickly (I'm not sure what the best option to use your own recording would be). Unfortunately even getting to the point where you don't wake up (at least not enough to notice) may not fully remove the impact but it would still help quite a bit.

As the other commenters mention, the answer is likely no, unless new tech like the OP becomes practical

The best thing I have found is to play thunderstorm sounds with earphones. Thunderstorm sounds are inoffensive (unless you happen to be afraid of them) and intrusive noises are camouflaged within the variability of the storm noises. It is thus capable of deflecting your attention from louder sounds than white noise (which basically needs to be a lot louder than the intrusive sound)

Try the Ozlo sleep buds, from folks who didn't want Bose sleep buds to disappear:

https://ozlosleep.com/

Consider the sound Crimson Cloak for city masking. These are not cancelling, they are masking, but reasonably effective as well as portable.

As for the rest of your piece, if you don't want to spend too much, look to recording studio sound baffling and absorption for your room's sound reflective surfaces, or theater drapery for your windows and if you need more a canopy bed or hospital bed curtain tracks to enclose you in damping.

If you are willing to spend more, NYC and similarly dense cities (1 in 50 Americans live in NYC) have specialty home builders that can make music rooms, piano practice rooms, neighbor noise blocking rooms, etc., using box within a box construction techniques to separate your space from the spaces around you with sound dampening. (Think like vacuum bottle, but for acoustic waves instead of cold/heat.)

Here are many approaches between these paths:

https://www.soundproofwise.com/soundproof-walls/

As a musician who plays the drum set, the typical wisdom is that noise isolation is basically impossible unless you're willing to build a "room within a room" that allows you to construct a heavy, physical insulating barrier between the inner and outer room.

Some noise dampening could work but probably won't get rid of all of the noise. You might want to look at a white-noise generator of some sort - I've recently discovered such a function on my (smart-but-now-antiquated) clock/radio. I use a rain sound but there are plenty of options out there. It does wonders for my sleep when there's a party in the neighbourhood or the pigeons are partying on my roof.

Get a good quality earplugs, but these real ones, made for musicians, not the single-use foam crap.

Musicians’ ear plugs are designed to let music go through, just not dangerous levels of pressure. I am very sensitive to sounds and I have tried many earplugs. Foam single-use plugs are the best.

> Musicians’ ear plugs are designed to let music go through

Technically true, but more accurately, they are basically a physical EQ filter, that (at least in perfect world) ducks down every frequency a similar amount of dB, to not alter the music too much except the level, so the music on stage still sounds the same, but quieter. You can find frequency graphs in the manual (disclaimer: I have bought the Alpine ones and they are good).

Some companies that make custom ones also make ones for sleep

https://acscustom.com/uk/products/other-products/sleep-sound

But yeah even they say that for maximum noise cancelling you want foam. These are better for comfort.

Incredibly important for the comfort and wellbeing of space travelers. Imagine being in an enclosed box compacted as efficiently as possible next to thrusters and life support equipment. The noise must be insane. At the same time, current noise suppression materials have to be heavy. Every gram saved is worth its weight in gold.

The Tines would kill for this tech.

Woof.

Cool stuff, especially for applications where space is at a premium and the adaptability of the material is at a premium.

Really useful for audio in a small space if this lives up to its promise. Absorbing low-frequency sound currently requires a lot of space

Exactly, and I guess there is potential in layering this and create way more compact absorbers.

This is a pretty interesting paper. I was not aware of the acoustic properties of silk (a fabric that continues to surprise me). The ability to actively dampen noise emission would obviously be of interest to ninja assassins but as someone who has hearing challenges I think exploiting its properties to make it into a full garment microphone might be an interesting application. Based on the sound levels in the paper I don't think it would work as a speaker however which is kind of good because everyone having their own mood music all the time would be super distracting.

> I don't think it would work as a speaker

https://www.parts-express.com/search?keywords=silk%20tweeter...

begs to disagree with you. (72 results, mostly for sale right now)

Technicalities! But its a good point. I was thinking unsupported fabric as would be found in clothing vs something strapped into a frame. A vague neuron in mine brain has faint memories of 'silk tweeters' in the Rogers Sound Labs studio monitors I used to have, alas 'big' three way speakers are much less common now.

>Finally, the fabric achieves a 75% decrease in sound as its vibrations are suppressed up to 95%, and it is controlled to modulate acoustic reflectivity.

If an LLM really did write this, I doubt it would be able to distinguish between the faculties of Active noise cancellation and direct sound suppression.

Within the IoT, SPL has potential blockchain applicability, even in an absence of its incorporation in various fabrics. `

This is a repost of an earlier HN post from months ago...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com