{"id":383782,"date":"2026-01-02T16:01:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-02T16:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/383782\/"},"modified":"2026-01-02T16:01:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-02T16:01:08","slug":"welcome-to-the-future-of-noise-canceling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/383782\/","title":{"rendered":"Welcome to the Future of Noise Canceling"},"content":{"rendered":"

This blurring of the lines between audio and health devices looks set to be a trend across the industry. \u201cWe really want to make sure that we take care of our customers\u2019 hearing,\u201d says Miikka Tikander, the Helsinki-based head of audio at Bang & Olufsen. Tikander points to recent data<\/a> about the decline in hearing health in young adults and reports that there was a lot of emphasis from manufacturers on ANC and hearing health at the AES\u2019 Headphone Technology<\/a> conference in Espoo, Finland this August.<\/p>\n

\u201cApple has a big lead in that area,\u201d he says. \u201cWe want to make sure that our headphones can adapt, make this choice [on when to block out sound] on your behalf, if you let it, of course. Some people don’t like that idea, but if there’s a noisy event in your surroundings, the headset can take care of it, just tune it out a bit and get you back to normal listening once you are away from that noise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Enter the \u201cSound Bubble\u201d<\/p>\n

Hearvana AI is one startup looking to go much further than the AirPods\u2019 current suite of noise canceling and ambient noise features. Cofounded by Shyam Gollakota, a computer science & engineering professor at the University of Washington, and two of his students, Malek Itani and Tuochao Chen, Hearvana recently raised $6 million in a pre-seed round<\/a> which included none other than Amazon\u2019s Alexa Fund.<\/p>\n

One of the startup\u2019s first big innovations was \u201csemantic hearing,\u201d which was the first project they approached, around three years ago. The team built a hardware prototype\u2014a pair of on-ear headphones with six microphones across the headband, connected to an Orange Pi microcontroller\u2014to test out a model that had been trained to recognize 20 different types of ambient sounds. This included things like sirens, car horns, birdsong, crying babies, alarm clocks, pets, and people talking, and then allowed the user to isolate say, one person\u2019s voice as a \u201cspotlight,\u201d and block out all the other frequencies.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo I’m going to the beach and I want to listen to just ocean sounds and not the people talking next to me, or I\u2019m in the house vacuum cleaning but I still want to listen to people knocking on the door or important sounds, like a baby crying,\u201d explains Gollakota, who is based in Seattle. \u201cAnd that\u2019s what we solved first. This was the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a door knock. They sound pretty different, right?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This blurring of the lines between audio and health devices looks set to be a trend across the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":383783,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[943,229,166,1426,186985,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-383782","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-audio","9":"tag-design","10":"tag-gadgets","11":"tag-headphones","12":"tag-noise-canceling","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}