Sound-suppressing silk can create quiet spaces

https://news.mit.edu/2024/sound-suppressing-silk-can-create-quiet-spaces-0507

by geox • 2 years ago

281 186 2 years ago

news.mit.edu

I would love to have something like this. Even better if it comes in a portable form for the occasional visit to the office.

Terr_• 2 years ago

I'm chuckling imagining a bunch of office-workers walking around with anachronistic silk head-veils and wimples.

BizarroLand• 2 years ago

And CEOs with $18,000 egg chairs lined with this.

Klaster_1• 2 years ago

Second this, I totally can imagine buying a bead or windows curtain made out of material so I won't have to use ear plugs every night to stop hearing dog barks.

oulipo2• 2 years ago

Or for snoring reduction

shmageggy• 2 years ago

Judging by the figures in the paper, it appears to attenuate low frequencies better than high frequencies, which is perhaps to be expected judging by experience with noise-cancelling headphones. This could be a game-changing complement to traditional acoustic treatment for recording studios and other acoustic spaces, where low frequencies are traditionally much harder to treat, requiring much larger and more expensive panels.

whydid• 2 years ago

I'm a mix/master engineer, and I just skimmed the paper to look for attenuation potential of this new material. It looks like they only tested above 100 HZ, which is still alright for conversation, but not for professional recording studios.

As you can imagine, the low frequency attenuation isn't great. But the performance of higher frequency attenuation is pretty good. I think this material would work well for meeting rooms, and perhaps restaurants. Not for recording studios.

aldanor• 2 years ago

Use this silk material as a cover for bass traps? Win-win

Wohlf• 2 years ago

Low frequencies travel further, in my house high frequency road noise is annoying but tends to come and go quickly but low frequency road noise I can often hear from literally miles away.

hinkley10• 2 years ago

"Farther" not just in a straight line but also around corners and through structures.

greenhearth• 2 years ago

I would buy a carpet made of this to not hear the downstairs people.

rendall• 2 years ago

Your downstairs neighbors would probably also appreciate it!

nwellinghoff• 2 years ago

Can’t get to market fast enough. They are absolutely right that applying this technology to silencing noise it sorely needed.

mixedbit• 2 years ago

I would love if advances in material technologies would allow to design a window glass-like material that would let outside air in, but would cancel exterior sounds.

ghusbands2• 2 years ago

I have seen such a thing in an article, though I don't know how to find it. It was a window with a square grid of circular holes in it - air could flow through, but sound waves were dissipated.

dest• 2 years ago

This maybe https://www.ntu.edu.sg/eee/news-events/news/detail/-noise-ca...

BHSPitMonkey• 2 years ago

That would be nice. The next best thing is probably a regular (shut) window with an ERV/HRV somewhere.

thfuran4• 2 years ago

Isn't that just better all around? Though a regular shut window isn't actually all that good at blocking sound.

squarefoot• 2 years ago

I'd be curious to know how would it damp lower frequencies that travel also by contact. Sound proofing for mid-high frequencies is easy if one doesn't aim at studio quality: just use wood and foam panels, break facing walls and angles with acoustic absorbing objects and cover every window or mirror (read: glass) with a thick curtain, add carpets on the floor and panels on the ceiling, and you're done. (hint: a $5 foam panel glued on a thin OSB board makes a quite effective, still light and cheap absorbing panel for mid-high frequencies) However, bass frequencies will be only marginally affected by that, and depending on what the room is used for, the above treatment might turn out as insufficient: probably overkill for recording a podcast, still not enough for recording music at higher volumes like when miking a band. Treatments for lower frequencies are expensive because of the necessity to literally prevent walls, floor and ceiling from vibrating, which invariably requires them to be weighed down adding concrete layers to further lower down their resonance frequency, before adding soundproofing. Sometimes the best approach is to build a drywall room into the room, which of course is more expensive and space constraining than the wood+foam panels solution.

Tom3849• 2 years ago

Active noise cancellation speakers. You can create small quiet bubble for your head, where you sleep.

michaelbuckbee• 2 years ago

You mentioned building drywall room - a neat building technique I only learned about recently that's along these lines (but a huge space and cost savings) is a "staggered stud" wall.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Carpentry/comments/13j7o4u/staggere...

johnvanommen3• 2 years ago

The silk sheet from the article is a loudspeaker.

The solution proposed in the article requires a microphone, and would have a tough time dealing with multiple sources.

It basically records the room, then plays the room back via the silk sheet, but out-of-phase. Because it's out of phase, it cancels out.

TazeTSchnitzel• 2 years ago

Another thing textiles can do is block wind: https://research.chalmers.se/en/publication/534412

sheepenumerator• 2 years ago

This is interesting! As someone who often struggles with noise from my environment, I'd love to have something like a mosquito net that can be put around my bed to keep the noise out.

xlii3• 2 years ago

Having sound sensitivity I’ll buy this the moment it comes out.

I’ve lost countless nights of sleep only because neighbors behind the walls had normal meet conversations past 12am. I really try to not be PITA but it’s my wellbeing vs theirs in the end. It’s a rental apartment so some are sympathetic and some are not.

In case you wonder why not ear plugs could help: they don’t work because I can hear my blood flow and heart beat and it’s even worse.

reportgunner• 2 years ago

You think this curtain will help ? Article says it vibrates when it's working so that will probably disturb you as well.

thfuran4• 2 years ago

How so?

Reubachi• 2 years ago

It's give and take, it will help more than bare hard wall.

Heavy curtains are the cheapest/easiest way to "sound deaden" a normal room. Their fabric surface area is greater than the bare wall, and the weight helps isolate vibration. Thinner ones will be less effective. Never effective as foam, and no method is as effective as actual mechanical isolation (IE a room suspended in a room)

taraparo• 2 years ago

Try Mack's silicon earplugs. they are not to be placed inside the ear canal but only to cover the entrance from the outside. so no unpleasant pressure, no heart beating etc. using them for years.

avidiax2• 2 years ago

You can also get custom fitted earplugs from an audiologist. They are wonderful. Extremely comfortable and they don't press on your ear canal, so you don't have any pain or hear your heartbeat, etc.

xlii3• 2 years ago

Whoa, they look amazing and could be a game changer. I ordered a box immediately, thanks for sharing!

amlib• 2 years ago

The best solution for these cases of mild inconvenient noise is to mask it with more noise, ideally a fan or a pink/brown noise generator, or even sounds of rain or a waterfall.

You want the noise to be indistinct enough that your mind won't focus on it. So avoid a bad fan that has a whiny pitch, that will drive you crazy.

drginducedlyric• 2 years ago

Just be happy you don't live below someone who stomps around their apartment all day and night. The deep thud of heel strike vibrates your body and because it's very fast attack/low frequency noise, it's very hard to block the sound itself. Ear plugs do nothing. It's like living inside of a drum.

driverdan• 2 years ago

Have you looked into the current solutions? MLV sound barriers such as curtains, for example, can help with this.

xlii3• 2 years ago

No I had not. Thanks for the comment, I’ll check those out!

hipjiveguy2• 2 years ago

I use bees wax earplugs when I sleep, and they are 5x better than the standard foam earplugs, imho

oulipo2• 2 years ago

This could be great to remove snoring noise for couples, instant seller haha

johnvanommen3• 2 years ago

It's kinda surprising that nobody has made a product for that, because it COULD be done with a plain ol' loudspeaker playing out of phase.

Basically:

1) put a mic above one person's head, in the headboard or somewhere near there

2) record the room

3) play the room back from the same location, but out of phase

voila! Snoring cancellation.

One unfortunate side effect is that it might be quite loud for other people in the home! Because the cancellation will only work well at a single point in space; get a few feet away and it will sound like TWO people snoring. (The snorer, and the loudspeaker.)

jstummbillig2• 2 years ago

I really, really hope the space of acoustic room treatment is incredibly inefficient and somebody can 10x a solution at some point. There is a lot of good that could be done by establishing acoustic treatment and managing noise (transmission) as a requirement for any type of indoor and outdoor construction.

logtempo2• 2 years ago

the problem in buildings is the building transmitting vibrations. That's why it's hard to find a solution afterward.

ben_w• 2 years ago

Indeed.

Anecdotal example: I'm currently living above a cafe, with an entire floor (with an office in it) between us and them.

When they drag the tables and chairs around, we can hear it easily, because it sets up a vibration through the structure of the building. Took us a long time to realise where the noise came from — it sounds like it comes from above, but the flat above us has been unoccupied on some of the occasions we heard the noise, and we were only able to confirm the real origin by me being outside the cafe watching them while my partner was inside, and with the two of us on a call so we could directly observe that what the cafe staff were doing correlated with the noises he was hearing.

prox• 2 years ago

Is this a “we didn’t consider it” problem, or a “it’s part of how we build these days” problem?

hinkley10• 2 years ago

It got real expensive here to build multifamily housing in part because you have to put acoustic separation in shared walls now. That and a tight construction market are putting the brakes on what would otherwise be unwise levels of growth. And therefore unlikely to change except by accident.

atoav2• 2 years ago

As someone who teaches an introductory course on acoustics and the nature of sound I have to say that I can't see how that would work.

The main problem is that acoustics are affected by everything within a room because sound from humans and most loudspeakers spreads in a somewhat special fashion. So your acoustics problem is usually:

1. Sound goes everywhere and it is not directed just to the places where ears are. This way the sound waves of me speaking also hits the ceiling in a million places and these reflected signals come at you with varying time delay and mix with the direct signal of my voice. If the surfaces of the room are hard, you will have those sounds bouncing around till they loose energy.

2. On top of that every room has particular frequencies that it resonates with to create resonances that make that specific frequency ring longer or the room seems to suck the energy out of that frequency. These are called the mosal frequencies of the room.

One remedy to 1 is to make big chunks room surfaces absorptive or to put more stuff into the room that scatters the souns waves earlier. So: carpets, special ceilings, curtains, acoustic panels or foam at the walls, etc. Tirns out human flesh is also quite good ar this, so packing the room with people also helps.

Another way to deal with 1 (if you can't touch the architecture) is to emit souns in a very directed manner only to where ears are. Nut that means microphones, a mixer, 5k€ per piece beamforming loudspeakers + personal with enough acoustic knowledge to place them in the right spot and steer the beam in the right way etc.

The room mode thing is almost luxury to treat by that point, but it typically involves changing the room geometry, and building buying specially tuned absorbers that are tuned and measured within the room. Depending on how low you want to go with the frequency of your acoustic treatment these absorbers become big fast and can take a third of the space in a room.

In my experience the main problem is that people building rooms treat acoustics as some afterthought, something expensive that you need to avoid to save money. In fact the planing stage is the cheapest place to improve acoustics. You could for example not decide to make a conference room with pure concrete walls/ceiling and a tiled floor, because any person should be able ro imagine the acoustics of that room.

I had to work in a newly gallery space that had worse acoustics than a church. When I asked the architect about the acoustics and why the delay times don't fit the purpose, the architect said for money reasons they ordered "a better looking car deck". The acoustic treatment of that space will cost way more than if they just hadn't decided on a barren ceiling and pure concrete walls.

The same points go for insulation between rooms. There is no magic here, just physics. If you want insulation you have to put mass between rooms and decouple/dampen their interactions. You either do that from the start by building things correctly or you do that afterwards by building another floating room in your existing room. In both cases you have to inspect painstakingly for acoustic bridges, sometimes a single nail touching the outer wall in the wrong way already bridges enough sound to make it noticable.

We know how to build good sounding and well insulated spaces. People just don't want to pay for it. We know how to reproduce speech in acoustically horrible places, people just don't want to pay for it. Acoustics is perceived as an abstract, high-brow, fancy classical-music-topic. That is, until people perceive how straining bad acoustics can be, then they want sudden magic solutions.

rapjr9• 2 years ago

Perhaps two sheets of material, one that acts as a high resolution two dimensional microphone array, the other that acts as a high resolution two dimensional speaker array with the microphone array a fixed distance from the speaker array. The microphone array detects sounds, the distance between sheets equals the processing delay as it relates to the speed of sound, and the speaker array cancels the wavefronts. Maybe two layers of microphone arrays would be needed to estimate the angle of arrival of the sound pressure fronts. That wouldn't help the problem of sound that travels through walls, ceiling and floor to the other half of the room (or to a different room). You'd need sound cancelers in front of or behind every room surface in every direction, and bass traveling through a floor seems difficult to stop since it would require a lot of energy. Still, a vibration isolated bed with these magic sound canceling sheets surrounding it might be fairly effective. Letting the sound of smoke alarms, air raid sirens, police sirens, etc. through in emergencies could be an issue. Sounds expensive using today's technology though, one sheet might require a fair amount of computer processing for say a 10,000 x 10,000 array of microphones and the same size speaker array. Starting with proper sound isolating construction might be cheaper. Though if mass produced the cost may eventually go down a lot. It doesn't necessarily have to solve all sound problems, just the ones some people find annoying. Perfect silence is in fact fairly spooky and freaks some people out (if you've ever been in an anechoic chamber).

vantassell• 2 years ago

I have to say that I can't see how that would work.

Isn't that exactly why this is a notable discovery?

JamesSwift• 2 years ago

The massive additional cost to construction is likely what holds it back. If you've ever looked into soundproofing, its a deep rabbit hole that basically boils down to you have to physically isolate all the physical materials that could transmit noise. So basically you have an inner-room built inset from an outer-room shell with noise dampening attachments at all the points they meet.

ineedaj0b3• 2 years ago

the cheapest way when I worked construction was doubling the drywall. Put up two sheets instead of one on all walls. Typical insulation in the walls was fine but double sheeting led to a significant reduction.

dissuade2• 2 years ago

Cars. Cars are the problem.

Don’t make buildings cost more. Stop the noise.

At the very least, you take a muffler off your Harley, you get your Harley taken away.

Jail.

Consequences for antisocial behavior.

Taking the most expensive fiber in the world and then adding gizmos to it is the wrong way

balfirevic• 2 years ago

I don't care about cars (I'm sure they are a problem for many, but not in my particular street). I do care that I can't sing and play instruments late at night.

alexose• 2 years ago

At the very least, you take a muffler off your Harley, you get your Harley taken away.

This is one problem that I think is eminently solvable. Virtually nobody wants these vehicles in their community.

The reason the problem persists is because they disappear out of sight and without evidence before anyone can do anything about it. Just as soon as they annoy everyone, they're gone.

(And let's be honest, the police aren't particularly incentivized to pull these people over, given that they're almost by definition selfish assholes who are difficult to deal with.)

One solution I've been daydreaming of is a device that could cheaply and reliably capture video of passing vehicles (detailed enough to read license plates) and assign a loudness rating. The loudest vehicles could be shared to a database, and the data made freely available to whatever agencies are responsible for issuing tickets.

I suspect that with a large enough body of a evidence, the existing laws become much easier to enforce.

konschubert4• 2 years ago

I bet you that they wanted to do the nose cancelling method and then discovered they applying a static voltage worked much better.

I am still bit sure how well it really works.

thfuran4• 2 years ago

I don't think applying a static voltage would do much. But as to how well it works,

In vibration-mediated suppression mode, the fabric could reduce sound transmission up to 75 percent.

So about 6 dB reduction.

konschubert4• 2 years ago

Thanks For pointing out that number. I didn’t see that somehow.

I was referring to this:

In the other, more surprising technique, the fabric is held still to suppress vibrations that are key to the transmission of sound. This prevents noise from being transmitted through the fabric and quiets the volume beyond. This second approach allows for noise reduction in much larger spaces like rooms or cars.

AltruisticGapHN• 2 years ago

À quieter world would be life changing. It’s incredible how low tech we are in regard to sound.

piva003• 2 years ago

From my own experience, it is life changing.

I grew up in São Paulo, Brazil, an extremely noisy city mostly due to traffic: old vehicles, motorbikes with open exhausts, cars honking, noisy trucks passing by residential neighbourhoods, an airport inside the city (with take-off and landing ramps over major residential neighbourhoods, including one I lived at), etc.

Moved to Sweden more than a decade ago and lived in very quiet places here, nowadays right in front of a forest with a couple of lakes nearby, and I simply cannot spend more than a few weeks back in São Paulo after getting used to the quietness. I feel much, much more stressed just existing there, even inside apartments on the 20th floor, even on the "quieter" parts of the city, it's a physical feeling that I do not shake off until I'm back home in Sweden.

One can get "used" to noisy environments but the difference it is to live in quieter areas is really hard to describe, I don't think I can tolerate living in noisy environments after seeing how life is on the other end of the spectrum...

soneca• 2 years ago

I live in São Paulo and I noticed that contrast when I visited the central area of Kopenhagen. It was impressive and delightful how quiet that neighborhood (without cars) is.

Of course I still can tolerate the noise, since I still live here. I am used to it and, most of the times, I don’t consciously care. But I do appreciate and miss the quietness.

throwaway13337• 2 years ago

I had a similar experience when I moved to a very rural house for a couple of years. It was extremely comfortable.

Whenever I got back to the city, I felt overwhelmed.

I ended up living in the city and getting used to the noise again. I made the conscious decision to do so because I felt like I limited myself a lot in the places that were acceptable.

Comfort is it's own prison.

I wonder, though, if there is some kind of gain I miss out on by getting used to discomfort.

pja• 2 years ago

The introduction of electric vehicles has made Spanish cities much quieter. The youth can hurtle around on their electric bikes / scooters in the wee hours without waking everyone up for miles around!

nox101• 2 years ago

Interesting? I don't generally find forest to be quiet. The cricket noises, shuffling leaves, etc keep me up. Of course city noises keep me up to but suburbs are often quiet

balder19912• 2 years ago

I also grew up in a Brazilian capital and during vacations I’d go to my grandma’s place in a farm about 2km away from a small city in the countryside.

Even to this day, one of my best memory of that place is the quietness I could experience by sitting at wheeling chair in the front of the house and the only sound you’d hear would be the wind, birds and sometimes chickens nearby.

Nowadays it isn’t the same sadly, because the city grew enough turn the road at the front much more busy. Now there’s a motorbike or truck passing by every 2 minutes, which spoils the whole experience.

faceplanted• 2 years ago

You seem to think the issue is noise, but have you considered noise might just be the most noticeable symptom of general city living? i.e. having much less personal space, nature, privacy, and free time to spend in them?

globular-toast3• 2 years ago

99% of noise is cars and motorbikes. The correct approach is not to invent some high-tech workaround but to go after the source of the problem. Otherwise it's like spending time micro-optimising a program that solves the wrong problem.

We don't even need to do anything radical like getting rid of cars. They can be quiet. Just ban loud vehicles. Force the use of quiet tyres on the road. Do not allow modifications that remove silencers etc. to be used on the road. Race tracks already implement a SPL test for cars at the exhaust. It would be dead easy to implement this for road cars. Already you've probably eliminated the need for anything high-tech for most people.

Then, for the next level, we need to keep driving cars out of our living spaces. Considering the bicycle exists, there is no need for people to transport their bodies from the outside of town to the inside at an average speed of less than 15mph[0]. It's insane.

[0] https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-do...

GrinningFool• 2 years ago

99% of noise is cars and motorbikes

If you live in the city, sure. But 99% of the noise I deal with is family members going about their lives. Would love a solution to help prevent sound transfer indoors, so that I can focus (and sleep) better.

est• 2 years ago

99% of noise is cars and motorbikes

EVs are incredibly quiet. (but yes they still honk)

AlecSchueler• 2 years ago

Very true. One of the remarkable things about Dutch cities is how quiet they are. Sometimes I step outside and just hear nothing and it's almost unsettling. Never experienced that in cities at home in Ireland were cars dominante, even in cities less than half the size.

balder19912• 2 years ago

Unfortunately that’s a social problem that one person can’t solve alone. Here in Brazil it seems to be a common problem that individuals looking for attention will modify their motorbikes to be extremely loud and I’ve never seen this kind of thing getting much outrage from other people. They treat it as normal and police seem to have more pressing things to worry about.

smeej2• 2 years ago

Just because there are bigger problems, it doesn't mean there isn't demand to solve smaller ones.

For example, most of the churches where I live have a big meeting room underneath their main worship space. This room has curtains to divide it into smaller spaces for a dozen or more different meetings, including Sunday school, where a dozen (often noisy) children might be in each room.

Having curtains that genuinely reduce the noise between the areas would make a huge difference! It would reduce the demand to build new buildings with separate walled rooms that wouldn't be used most of the time.

Adding flexibility of use to larger spaces with a variety of demands is a problem worth solving, even if it's not as big of a problem as motor vehicle noise in large cities.

forgotusername6• 2 years ago

Where I am right now 99% of the noise is coming from animals. The birds are non stop dawn til dusk and there is currently a dog barking...

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

99% of noise is cars and motorbikes.

I live atm in a place not too far from an airport: I see planes at a distance several times a day, big ones.

I cannot hear them: triple-glazed windows everywhere in the apartment. It works.

I hate noise: since forever I assemble (or have the shop assemble for me) PCs that are extremely quiet. Otherwise I will hear it. AMD 7700X CPU in "eco" mode (in the BIOS) and Noctua cooler/fan, Be Quiet! PSU, Be Quiet! tower. No GPU besides the CPU's iGPU (so it's fanless). I cannot hear that thing.

Then I love music. I'll hear that one loose bolt that did detach and is now vibrating in the system ceiling when I listen to music.

Noisy fridge, fans (there's one in one of the toilet), this or that device humming: there are many source of noise inside your place that can be really annoying when your place is quiet.

Besides the triple-glazed windows, the (small) building is well built: no common walls with neighbors on the same floor (it's the stairs and elevator that do separate the apartments). Only 8 apartments. Very smart architecture. Ultra quiet.

The correct approach is not to invent some high-tech workaround but to go after the source of the problem.

You've never tried a place with properly installed triple-glazed windows: you'll be surprised. I'm not saying cars shouldn't be less noisy but making your living place quieter ain't that complicated: (quality and properly installed) triple-glazed windows and call it a day.

paulsutter2• 2 years ago

Force the use of quiet tyres on the road

Could you expand on this? Above 20-30mph tire noise is the dominant noise from vehicles [1] and I haven't yet found a reference that shows significant reduction by choice of tires

Personally I think we need to put cars underground - without tunnels we'll be in traffic hell forever[2]. And imagine the quiet.

[1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/pavement/sustainability/articles/ti...

[2] Elon Musk

vladvasiliu• 2 years ago

99% of noise is cars and motorbikes.

It depends on where you live. My apartment building is older, built before acoustic norms came into effect. I can hear my neighbor two floors up wake up in the middle of the night to take a pee.

I have 0 issues with traffic or other city noise, even though I like having my windows open and live in Paris, one of the densest cities in the world.

tsss• 2 years ago

Cars aren't the sort of noise that I primarily care about. Neighbors with their god-awful dogs and children that scream and hit the walls 24/7 are far worse.

nayuki3• 2 years ago

99% of noise is cars and motorbikes

See Not Just Bikes' "Cities Aren't Loud: Cars Are Loud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

lloydatkinson• 2 years ago

As I read your comment I became aware of just how loud a simple standing fan I have currently behind me is, even on the lowest of settings. Fan design feels comically lacking in this regard. I am sure it could be much quieter even when faster.

Dyson fans are meant to be quieter, but for a premium.

blueaquilae• 2 years ago

I suspect this can explain a lot of the IQ loss since it become difficult to build concentration.

shawabawa3• 2 years ago

What IQ loss? IQ scores have consistently increased over time

shepherdjerred• 2 years ago

If we're talking about concentration, social media/devices likely play a _much_ larger part.

mrtesthah2• 2 years ago

Insofar as traffic is concerned, any drop in IQ would be more likely related to PM2.5 pollution levels than noise:

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/air-pol...

goda90• 2 years ago

A quieter world is one where the outdoors is quieter because we stop producing so much noise in the first place. This would benefit us and wildlife, which are very negatively impacted by not just our classic pollution but our noise and light pollution too.

2trill2spill• 2 years ago

Agreed, its one of the many reasons I cant wait for the shift from ICE vehicles to EVs, they are just so much quieter.

ineedaj0b3• 2 years ago

You might be forgetting about how loud birds can be. At least twice a week I'll wake up to birds chirping until at least 7am.

They are extremely loud, second only to no muffler cars and sport bikes blasting through deserted back roads.

If you live in the woods with trees, they'll sound as loud as the ocean. If you live near the ocean, well that's always loud.

The biggest offenders are:

1. cars/trucks 2. birds 3. airplanes 4. ac units 5. ocean 6. wind with trees

You'd never know trees sound like the ocean if you aren't around trees. Trains are loud but intermittent. And trains don't run very often anymore where I am.

rtkwe• 2 years ago

We know quite a bit about how to block and mitigate sound the issue is it's transmitted through the air which we want to move around for other reasons so it's tough to block one without making stuffy areas.

barrenko• 2 years ago

Yes, but then more people would start to hear their inner voice.

rolandog• 2 years ago

The sound-suppressing silk builds off the group’s prior work to create fabric microphones.
In that research, they sewed a single strand of piezoelectric fiber into fabric. Piezoelectric materials produce an electrical signal when squeezed or bent. When a nearby noise causes the fabric to vibrate, the piezoelectric fiber converts those vibrations into an electrical signal, which can capture the sound.

Well, that is ... disconcerting. A slightly funny and dystopian future comes to mind of world leaders having to get naked to ensure they're not being spied on by the possibly nation-state-hacked ad-tracker-subsidized clothes.

olleromam91• 2 years ago

Cool research. The assessed conditions are very tightly controlled, and I wish they better described the sensing mechanism used for the feedback in the “vibration mediated suppression” method. but the new material approach is promising however, as it’s much less intrusive than other approaches.

Jailbird• 2 years ago

My first thought was that airplanes need noise canceling for the engine sounds. There's a real difference in a long flight with and without noise canceling headphones. Effective (better?) noise cancelation for the whole cabin would be impactful.

johnvanommen3• 2 years ago

It's difficult if not impossible to do active noise cancellation for multiple people simultaneously.

sheepscreek• 2 years ago

What a time to be alive! Excited at the prospect of quieter cars, better noise cancelling headphones, quieter airplanes…

My only wish is for a fabric that doesn’t involve poor silkworms.

nashashmi• 2 years ago

Question for research: Do these sound absorbing properties also exist in plant leafs?

prepend• 2 years ago

Would this work with fabrics so we have clothes that give us quiet zones around us?

smolder• 2 years ago

Reading the comments here seems to indicate to me people don't know a lot about the subject areas surrounding noise like acoustics and building construction, but I think that just reflects society more broadly.

The amount of investment in mitigating noise pollution is pretty underwhelming, partly because it's expensive, I think, but largely from ignorance. I tried to get a former general manager to acoustically treat a big obnoxiously echoey open floor space and their solution was to ignore everything I said and buy some annoying white noise generators, which misunderstands the problem we had with the space. Tons of apartment buildings cheap out on isolation in a really tragic way, where the difference to quality of life could be big with only minor adjustments to plans. The most tragic from my experience: when some builder decided to skip putting a real wall between neighboring apartments' bedrooms. Instead there were closets constructed from a single 3/4" layer. That "wall" couldn't stop a snore.

llsf3• 2 years ago

The particularly frustrating part is that is usually way cheaper to put sound barriers during construction, than retrofitting later on.

We have been discussing this with my neighbors. We are both committed to eventually pull the trigger to retrofit, but the initial estimate is $70K and one apartment being under heavy construction for months...

hinkley10• 2 years ago

Maybe you should arrange to do it at the same time and get temporary rentals somewhere else.

Presumably you're doing a shared wall, but having the plumber or electrician out for two jobs is probably cheaper than having them out twice, right? Especially since there will be similarities in the levels of stupid they find in the walls.

kingnothing• 2 years ago

I’m struggling to understand how something along the lines of ripping out the existing drywall, rebuilding a few walls worth of framing with offset studs, and filling them with rockwool would remotely approach $70k for maybe 40 feet of wall in an apartment / condo. $10k, sure, that’s easy. What is the contractor proposing?

jauntywundrkind• 2 years ago

It'd be great if there were better ways for consumers to understand what they're getting.

A semi recent house hunting trip involved trying to shout between rooms, going outside and banging on pots and pans. Very informal ways of trying to guess.

It's be wonderful if there were some standard ways to assess, that builders could advertise. Figuring out how to make a rating that is both not crazy expensive to assess, and also meaningful enough that consumers place some level of trust in it isnt easy.

But wow, it feels like there has to be visibility into what we get to drive change. And right now there's just so few ways to know what you're getting.

HanyouHottie• 2 years ago

There is a standard, Sound Transmission Class [1]. STC-50 is generally considered to be a good level of sound isolation. I have no idea if houses are commonly constructed with a concern for this rating though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_transmission_class

johnchristopher3• 2 years ago

N=1 but in my personal experience most people don't care about loud sound levels anymore. Neither when they produce it nor when they are experiencing it. I blame two things: a) they are already deaf anyway b) I am getting grumpier and have always been more sensible to noise than others.

simoncion• 2 years ago

...most people don't care about loud sound levels anymore.

It's probably less this and more (at least in the US) that it's very, very, very hard to find "multi-family" housing that's not soul-crushingly substandard [0], so at some point you just give up and try to do a reasonably good job of balancing "living your damn life" with "not making so much noise as to be enormously obnoxious too often".

[0] It might be true that very few USians have ever lived in a place with actually adequate acoustic insulation... so very few folks even would think to look for it.

neves• 2 years ago

I use earplugs :-)

throw__away73912• 2 years ago

To me it is always a crazy feeling to visit some old school restaurant or bar with heavy drapes/carpets/textiles covering the flat surfaces. They have a feeling of almost being haunted/enchanted, but the exact reason isn't necessarily obvious. The sound of people talking around you takes on a peculiar quality and feels simultaneously warm and more distant than it actually is.

hinkley10• 2 years ago

I miss the big overstuffed booths. I don't like the person behind me wiggling, but I didn't realize how much sound they ate until they were gone.

Where are you finding these old school restaurants? We need to make lists.

hinkley10• 2 years ago

Restaurants opted for ease of cleaning about 40 years ago and that changeover happened fast enough that some adults here probably never really experienced a restaurant situations where you could have a conversation without raising your voice.

Long ago when Red Robin still had good food, I didn't want to go there because it was loud as all fuck in their restaurants. Now every restaurant is exactly the same.

Wearing earplugs while chewing is a very strange experience.

paulbgd• 2 years ago

I’m looking up photos of restaurants 40+ years ago and struggling to find any obvious acoustic differences in their designs (I do notice carpet seems more prominent?) Do you have any examples of what they used to do better?

Alupis2• 2 years ago

Red Robin isn't exactly the type of restaurant I would think of when I want a quiet table - it is half a sport's bar after all.

If you go to a nicer restaurant, you will get a quiet table. It's the type of restaurant that matters - not so much acoustic design.

class3shock• 2 years ago

If you came looking for actual numbers the closest they come is saying "in vibration-mediated suppression mode it could reduce sound transmission up to 75%".

theGnuMe• 2 years ago

Awesome. I’ll buy the curtains or piezo electric fiber windows

Sound-suppressing silk can create quiet spaces

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