When someone else's awful music fills the car, road journeys might feel extra-long. What if you could listen to your music alone, with no one else hearing it? Although this may appear to be science fiction, the technology is closer than you would imagine. Personal sound zones that adjust as the conditions in your automobile change are being developed by researchers in France.
Headphones are useful for regulating what you hear, but they may also be irritating. Furthermore, if you turn up the level of your music too loudly to drown out other sounds, you risk hearing impairment.
"Hearing loss can be caused by using headphones or earbuds," she warns. And it isn't just the elderly who are affected. "Nearly half of young people aged 12 to 35 [are] at risk," she adds, citing the level at which many adolescents listen to music.
Inside a car, personal listening bubbles, or zones, might allow you to hear well without having to block out other noises with excessive volumes. They'd also open up a slew of new options. In an automobile, everyone may listen to their own audio in secret.
Multiple loudspeakers are being used by GO Engineers to create these individualized sound zones. The signals are not all broadcast at the same time, but they are synchronized. High-quality sound is heard when the listener's head is in a "sweet spot." The music lessens as one moves away from the sweet spot. This is due to the fact that sound waves from separate loudspeakers interact and cancel each other out.
Patricia Davies is a Purdue University mechanical engineer in West Lafayette, Indiana. She is interested in sound and perception. She claims that the noise-canceling method works effectively with headphones. "Creating silent zones anyplace in a three-dimensional area, such as the interior of a vehicle, is tough," she says.
One explanation is that sound waves are extremely sensitive. The speed at which the waves move can be affected by changes in temperature and humidity. The number of persons in the automobile, as well as other circumstances, can make a difference. Because the integrity of a sound zone depends on sound waves interacting in precisely the correct manner, even a little alteration in one of them may have a large influence.
Even yet, creating personal sound zones in automobiles is easier than in other locations. "What's intriguing in a car is that we know where the individuals are," Manuel Melon adds. The loudspeakers might be incorporated inside the headrests itself. Melon is an acoustician at the University of Le Mans in France, where he investigates sound.
Personal sound zones will only become popular if they perform similarly to headphones. The sound quality cannot deteriorate whether you turn on the air conditioner or pick up a passenger. Melon and his colleagues recently upgraded an existing system with this in mind. They wrote about it in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in September 2021.
The team started with a sound-zone prototype. Four loudspeakers inside the headrest provided a customized sound zone for each of the two front seats in a test automobile. The zones were built with the assumption that sound waves will constantly flow in the same direction.
For starters, the researchers discovered that shifting the chairs away from their initial position degraded the acoustic quality of the zones. The sweet spot's placement may fluctuate somewhat if the chairs are moved. Furthermore, sound waves from various loudspeakers may interact differently. They could no longer be able to cancel each other out. Multiple microphones were placed on either side of the headrest, near to the listener's ears. These microphones were used to listen in. The time it took for a sound wave to travel from each loudspeaker to each listening device was measured by the researchers. This provided them with information about the sound waves' trajectories. This was done on both headrests.
The measurements were then fed into an algorithm. This is a collection of mathematical rules. The results of this algorithm are determined by the measurements you enter. The algorithm took into account the present pathways of the sound waves in this case. As a result, the system was able to decide which signals each loudspeaker should play in order to get the optimal sound zone.
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