Imagine this: You're at an office job, wearing noise-canceling headphones to dampen the ambient chatter. A co-worker arrives at your desk and asks a question, but rather than needing to remove the headphones and say, "What?", you hear the question clearly. Meanwhile the water-cooler chat across the room remains muted. Or imagine being in a busy restaurant and hearing everyone at your table, but reducing the other speakers and noise in the restaurant.
A team led by researchers at the University of Washington has created a headphone prototype that allows listeners to create just such a "sound bubble." The team's artificial intelligence algorithms combined with a headphone prototype allow the wearer to hear people speaking within a bubble with a programmable radius of 3 to 6 feet. Voices and sounds outside the bubble are quieted an average of 49 decibels (approximately the difference between a vacuum and rustling leaves), even if the distant sounds are louder than those inside the bubble.
The team published its findings Nov. 14 in Nature Electronics. The code for the proof-of-concept device is available for others to build on. The researchers are creating a startup to commercialize this technology.
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