[brontide]

…startup

Mutebox

The anti-jukebox that lets you mute restaurants' ambient music to bring back the vitality of your surroundings. For when your favorite cafe is playing experimental electronic music and you really came for the sound of espresso machines and light background noise while you crank out that TPS report. Or, the jukebox that exclusively plays John Cage's 4'33". [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4′33″

[foreigner]

Yes! Maybe it could work like those song recognition apps. A microphone identifies the background music and then it plays an inverse waveform in to your earbuds to cancel it out. I would pay lots of money for that.

[snailmailman]

This is exactly how active noise cancellation works on many modern headphones/earbuds, although I don't think they actually try to identify the song.

[foreigner]

Active noise cancellation devices that I've heard of try to analyze the noise to predict what it will do next so they know what to cancel out. They're expensive because they have to be fast enough to react to changes in the sound, and imperfect because they will always lag behind changes to the sound they're trying to cancel.

If you could identify the song then you could simply fast-forward it to know "what it will do next" and the cancellation would be much easier and more accurate.

[egypturnash]

This kind of noise cancellation really only works on constant drones, not more complex waveforms like music.

[bonestamp2]

Combine that with a speech analyzer and synthesizer and you could theoretically even eliminate the voices of individual people (particularly that annoying person who sits near you in a cafe/plane/work).

[dorchadas]

Actually, that'd be perfect even if the person wasn't annoying. Be really great for long-haul flights when you need to sleep (such as US > Europe).

[wffurr]

Like a noise canceling speaker I could place on the table to eliminate the music from that area?

[Scoundreller]

The problem with that is the time differences between when things hit your ears, the speaker and the source.

I suppose it could work if your ears are always in a known place.

That’s why we can only make noise cancelling headphones.

[Hello71]

this already exists. it's called Muzo, and ElectroBOOM reviewed it as an obvious scam.

[mordechai9000]

I was curious if this was possible, and I did some quick research. From what I gathered, it's just not practical. There are a multitude of mutually interfering sources and reflective surfaces in a noisy real world environment. You just can't plop a mic down - or an array of mics - and cancel the audio it receives. You have to put the mic and the cancelling audio as close to the ear as possible, and isolate the listener as much as you can. Which we already have, in noise cancelling headphones.

[pazimzadeh]

So, the AirPods Pro with "transparency mode?"

[yathern]

No - that will not mute music around you, but allow you to hear it through the headphones.