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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.

> 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.

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.

Do you guys think that would work?

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.

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.

Cool stuff, especially for applications where space is at a premium and the adaptability of the material is at a premium.

Since it’s in the zeitgeist, the piezofiber used is a pfas. It uses similar pfas materials that all lithium ion batteries utilize for safety.

We will have to wrap our heads around which pfas technology is worth it.

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.

This is a repost of an earlier HN post from months ago...