Software Noise Cancellation?

DangerTenor asks: "As I flew around the world, lusting after my coworker's $300 BOSE Quiet Comfort Noise-cancelling headphones, I looked down at my laptop computer and noticed the built-in microphone. Has anyone written or considered writing software to run noise-cancellation based on the built-in mic?"

Comments

Reasons this may not work

[quantax]

Here is how noise-dampening works:

A quick overview of sound; all sounds are comprised of varying frequency, and amplitude pressure waves. A sound dampener 'listens' to a sound, and emits it 180 degrees out of phase. This means the crests and troughs of the 2 waves are overlapped, negating one another.

The main issue to be overcome is direction and such that shifts the pitch of sounds coming from a computer. Unless you are using a very high quality, wide pickup mic (which are rather expensive), you are probably not going to be able to get enough sound precision to be able to get the damper working effectively. Also, positioning the mic would take a while to get the best location for maximal damping effect for overall sound. This is still work checking out though cause it may yield greater results than I think it will. However, most computer users do not have high quality mics in the first place (and a $20 mic wont cut it). The more mics used, the more effective this would be due to wider sound coverage.