Noise cancelling program

Question

If you were to write a program that takes microphone input, reverses it (sets it out of phase by making 1's 0's and 0's 1's), and plays it back out of the speakers, could that cancel out sound? Wave physics says if crests align with troughs, destructive interference occurs, so can that be utilized here to achieve a lessened noise if not canceled out "completely." I can imagine that this wouldn't work due to either complication in reversing the audio, or even because it takes too long to reverse and play back, so that the sound wave has passed. If i had to associate a language to do this in it would have to be either c++ or java (I'm at least competent in both).

Answer 1

Yes it will cancel out sound. That's more or less how Surround Sound works: by subtracting the left/right channels, playing that in the 3rd speaker, and inverting the samples, playing those out of the 4th you get interesting spatial effects.

Also you wouldn't simply want to toggle all bits, you'd get noise; instead you want to negate.

With a small sample buffer you'd be fast enough to cancel out waves of certain frequencies. When these attack and decay, you'll be lagging, but as long as the wave sustains you can effectively cancel it out.

With bigger sample buffers, obviously the delay increases, since it takes longer to fill the buffer with samples. The size of the buffer determines how often a device interrupt occurs where the program would copy the input samples to an output buffer while applying an operation to them.

Typically recordings are made at 44.1kHz, meaning that many samples per second. If you set the buffer to say 256 samples, you would get notified 44100/256 times a second that there are 256 samples to be processed.

At 256 samples you'd lag behind 256/44100 = 0.0058 seconds or 5.8 milliseconds. Sound travels at around 340 m/s, so the sound wave would have moved 1.97 meters (340 * 5.8ms). This wavelength corresponds with the frequency 172 Hz (44100/256). That means that you can only effectively cancel out frequencies that have a lower frequency than that, because those of a higher frequency 'move' more than once during 5.8ms and are thus above the maximum 'sample rate', if you will.

For 64 samples, the frequency would be 44100/64 = 689 Hz. And, this is the maximum frequency! That means you could cancel out bass and the base frequency of the human voice, but not the harmonics.

A typical OS has it's clock frequency set to either 500, 1000, or 2000 Hz, meaning at best you could use a sample buffer of around two to three samples, giving you a maximum frequency of 500, 1000, or 2000 Hz. Telephones usually have a maximum frequency of about 3500 Hz.

You could get the system clock up to around 32kHz, and poll an ADC directly to reach such frequencies. However, you'd probably need to solder one to your LPT and run a custom OS, which means Java is out of the question, or use a pre-fab real-time embedded system that runs Java (see the comment by @zapl for links).

One thing I forgot to mention, is that you will need to take into account the position of the sound source, the microphone, and the speaker. Ideally all 3 are in the same place, so there is no delay. But this is almost never the case, which means you'd get an interference pattern: there will be spots in the room where the sound is cancelled, inbetween spots where it is not.