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ChatterBlocker — Block Distracting Speech at Work
An anonymous reader writes "ChatterBlocker is a PC program that uses digital audio technology to neutralize the sound of speech and other distractions so you can stay focused at work or elsewhere." Personally I just crank the tunes. Anyone know if this actually works or if it's a scam? Or is it just a white noise generator?
I dunno. Sounds like it would have a chilling effect on free speech to me.
Nothing to hear here, move along.
This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earplugs ought to work just as well, if not better.
Cheaper too I'd suppose.
I downloaded the demo, turned on all the options, set the reverb to high, and now I can't concentrate on anything at all. This thing is totally useless.
This guy's the limit!
WOW. MINDBLOWING.
[insert witty comment here]
After playing with it for a few minutes, I think I've found the perfect setting to keep people away from my desk--turn everything off except for Cypress Goats.
This guy's the limit!
snakeoil ...
... people buying this may be stupid. But reminding them to breathe ?
Quote:
"ChatterBlocker includes bell sound loops that can be used as periodic reminders to breathe"
now, come on
Why did'nt you try the demo? I did, and this stupid program does nothing more than generate sound. This way you have even more noise around you.
Really, worst article ever.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
Does ChatterBlocker use noise cancellation?
No. Noise cancellation would not be effective over speakers, and noise cancelling headphones have limited effectiveness in silencing voice.
Good quality noise cancelling headphones are great for reducing low-frequency sounds, such as airplane engine rumble, but they are not as effective in the 2 to 8 kHz consonant range that conveys much of the speech intelligibility.
I just keep a bowl of crunchy cereal at my desk AT ALL TIMES.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Hey, that's simple enough. If the boss is screaming from the other end of the corridor, you just put the microphone there. If the corridor is long enough, that gives you a plenty of time for the OS to get the sound at the signal propagation speed, while it reaches your ears from air. Then, you'll just need to tune the system to model the time-frequency response distortions through mic, corridor sound reflections and the pecularities of your amplifiers and speakers.
My computer came with a hardware version. It sits near the back and blows air out a vent to create speech-canceling noise.
--When you buy proprietary software, you don't get better software. What you get is the right to complain about it.
If anyone has ever wondered if Taco and the other editors even bother clicking on the links in the summaries, here's your answer: "Anyone know if this actually works or if it's a scam? Or is it just a white noise generator?"
Anyone who's taken even 15 seconds to look into this will instantly know the answer.
This guy's the limit!
They work well for sounds that are continuous, such as the hum of a refrigerator, but are rather ineffective against speech or other rapidly changing audio signals.
Noise cancellation requires hardware. Headphones use microphones to pick up the sounds which are then cancelled by phase-inversion. It gets vastly more complex when dealing with open spaces. This is nothing that software alone has a solution for.
Do you have any idea what kind of energy is released when chatter voices come into contact with anti-chatter voices?
http://nerdcartoons.com/
...when I'm irratated at work, even silence can be distracting.
And there are those who have just the right irratating, cutting thru anything (even head phones blasting) voice sound, change in volume, starts to say something five different ways before they stumble it out, etc..that you just have to know ain't nobody going to custom create sounds to drown these unique voices out.
But this is not a scam as I'm sure it is capable of smoothing over common chatter. I think what helps me to believe this is that I saw some short clip on TV about movie sound effects. Ever notice that background murmer of people talking in a scene where there are lots of people but you really only hear the actors in focus? This is only one example, but there is at least one company that does nothing but deal with teh talent that is hired for these background effects.
My reasoning is that if you can create such chatter that is not so distracting, you probably have a good idea as to what is distracting and that should make for a good start at address the problem,
Now if you check out the site, you'll see they are far from being new to the sound industry.
It may not work as well as you like against those uniquly distracting voices but for alot of offices it probably would help.
As to mind focusing sounds, this is also been researched. I myself sometimes listed to Yani to help life my mental state and I read something where during the playing of some mathmatically/logically correct classical piece (bach or batoveen sp?) it is difficult to lie.
I suppose the trick is to take the distracting noice and add such pleasing noise to the mmix that blends the distraction into the acceptable.
I've noticed some music works better than other at drowning out specific office noise.
Someone saw me with head phones on and ask: Rocking Out? I said: No! Drowning out....
So i guess the way it works is by making sounds that blend with other background noises, but aren't as annoying (in theory).
ChatterBlocker uses nature sounds, music and background "anti-chatter" voices (or "walla") to mask the intelligibility of unwanted conversations. It does not use noise cancellation (which, as has been pointed out, would not work using speakers and has limited effectiveness at voice frequencies).
It's obvious from your feedback that we did not make this clear enough. We discuss this in detail on our FAQ page, in the "More Info" page and in our white papers, but we have now added additional clarification to our home page. I thought I was doing a good thing by taking off my engineering hat and putting on my marketing hat, focusing on the benefits not the technology, but obviously this has derailed the discussion toward the topic of noise cancellation.
Our testers felt the program was useful for masking unwanted conversations, and less distracting than listening to pop music. If you're interested, give the demo a try. We welcome your feedback.
Earl Vickers
The Sound Guy, Inc.
http://chatterblocker.com
I'm interested in these results Larry suggested. My friends and I for the last year have been working on a skill, one that we wondered if it was possible while bored in a lecture one day, where as usual you filter all noise that is irrelevant (the venues in our cases include lecture theaters and filled refectories) and touch type on an assignment or other wise engaging task with the added difficulty of holding a detailed conversation on another topic with some one else. In the beginning it was rather impossible though surprisingly enough it is rather doable as we have found with only a little practice and then a lot of usage to get the words per minute ratio up.
Laptops allow you to be anywhere and we know we can filter noise and information a lot better than is currently done (and with less effort than at least I expected) plus the human brain is perfect for multitasking. I wonder if this sort of thing is indeed the future of at least geekdom, maybe of office space in general?
I ate your fish.
It seems that nobody in this thread understands the problems with noise cancellation. Of course it is trivial to build an analog circuit that substracts the signal from a small microphone from the signal that goes to the headphone speaker. Unfortunately, that won't work. The problem is that a headphone typically has a very complicated frequency response resulting from the resonances in de closed volume between the eardrum and the headphone loudspeaker, and the attempts of the headphone designer to compensate for these resonances. (see for example here). The net effect is that the impulse response of the headphone/ear system with respect to electrical signals going into the speaker is about 1.5 ms. That means that even if you have full knowledge of the interaction of the headphone with a particular ear, you need to know what sound wave to cancel 1.5 milliseconds in advance. In this time, the sound can travel about 50 cm, which is obviously more than the 1-2 cm between the headphone speaker and the microphone.
So to make an effective noise-cancellating headphone, you have to compromise on sound quality in order to give it a quicker impulse response. Then you will have to accept that you will never be able to effectively cancel out high frequencies (above 1 kHz or so). Finally, you will still need to build some kind of lowpass filter such that you won't substract the higher frequencies with the wrong phase and thus increase the noise rather than decrease it. With all these constraints, you can be happy if you achieve 10 dB reduction.
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