Making Your Room Quiet

el_flynn writes "This may be a cure for those of you with loud computers, or perhaps those who spend lots of time in NOC rooms that generate lots of noise: NewScientist.com mentions about a "Silence Machine" that gets rid of unwanted noise. I want one to quiet down my neighbour's loud dogs. " These are also being tested in cars, to make the car quieter. I've got a pair of the headphones that the article alludes to - they make airplane travel much nicer, and having something like this to cancel machine noise would be excellent.

Comments

In-box silencer

[el_flynn]

How about this idea: have an extra soundcard installed in your machine, hook it up to a small mic and speaker, and put the mic and speaker inside the PC casing.

Input from the mic would be fed to some app that could analyze the sound coming in, generate the appropriate cancellation frequencies and output via the speaker. Tada - quiet PC!

Of course you wouldn't want the mic to be on continuously - there would be feedback when the mic accepts signals from the speakers. But we could possibly run a cron job that turns on the mic while shutting the soundcard output, and perform the analysis once every minute/5 minutes/whatever your fancy. This would be a good way to make use of your spare cycles.

Howzat?