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.
> 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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
By the time I wrote my thesis, I was far more assertive in politely declining many of his edits.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
Note: Her balloons are not typically helium filled, so the other users question about air/helium might make a difference.
Deleted Comment
I am a light sleeper and would love to use it somehow in my bedroom, but keeping it contained is tricky.
Deleted Comment
We will have to wrap our heads around which pfas technology is worth it.
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?
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).
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.
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)
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/
https://www.parts-express.com/search?keywords=silk%20tweeter...
begs to disagree with you. (72 results, mostly for sale right now)