Noise-canceling technology offers freedom from noise, but it can have side effects such as safety issues and social disconnection. It’s important to balance the pros and cons of this technological advancement and find ways to deal with it.
Noise is defined as sensory pollution perceived by the sense of hearing. It’s not just a sound we hear, it’s an environmental factor that deeply affects our daily lives. With the development of cities and the rapid growth of our mechanized modern society, noise is becoming more and more common around us. Noise comes from traffic, factories, and even the many electronic devices in our homes. How does noise from these different sources affect humans?
Noise has both physiological and psychological effects on the human body and reduces performance. For example, constant noise exposure can cause people to feel tired easily, have trouble concentrating, and even experience anxiety and stress. Long-term exposure to noise has a negative impact on the heart and brain, which increases the risk of developing chronic diseases such as high blood pressure and insomnia. Furthermore, the stress caused by noise can affect the digestive system, including the stomach and colon, as well as the respiratory system. As you can see, noise is not just an unpleasant sound, but a serious threat to our health.
Of course, certain patterns of noise, such as white noise in a reading room, can actually help you concentrate. It acts as a background sound, reducing distractions and contributing to better concentration. However, irregular and loud noises are different. Unnecessary and loud noises seem to do us a lot of harm. In particular, unexpected loud sounds can cause a sharp increase in heart rate, which can lead to temporary panic or anxiety.
Noise canceling is a technology that blocks or artificially removes unnecessary noise from our lives. This technology is becoming an important innovation for solving modern noise problems. Noise canceling reduces noise in two main ways. First, there’s passive cancellation, where you physically block external noise from entering your ears. Examples include soundproof headphones or kernel earphones that sit deep in the ear. This approach simply reduces noise through physical isolation, allowing the user to feel isolated from outside noise. The second is active cancellation, which is the electronic removal of noise. Noise canceling as we expect or think of it usually refers to the second method, active cancellation. This is a more technologically advanced form of noise cancellation that analyzes ambient noise in real time and generates sound waves to cancel it out.
When talking about noise canceling technology, one of the most important elements is the microphone in your earphones or headphones. This relates to the principle of electronic noise cancellation mentioned above, which uses the effect of canceling interference in sound. This means that when waves of opposite phases are superimposed, the amplitude of the synthesized wave is zero, i.e. the sound is zero. In other words, if the ambient noise generates a sound that is opposite to the waveform that the microphone has, the magnitude of the noise will be zero. Based on this principle, headphones listen to the ambient noise through the microphone and send the opposite sound wave to the user. This allows the user to hear less of the ambient noise.
This active cancellation technology was first presented in 1936, when Paul Gregg patented it. It was later developed by Dr. Amar Bose, founder of the global sound equipment company Bose, in 1978, and 11 years later, in 1989, the first commercially available aircraft-type noise-cancelling headphones were introduced for airline employees who suffered from noise-induced hearing loss due to jet engines and cabin noise. This innovation greatly reduced the discomfort caused by noise in everyday life and provided auditory comfort to many people.
However, as noise-canceling technology has become more popular, new problems have emerged. Noise-induced hearing loss has seen a significant increase in the number of sufferers along with the popularization of earphones. The improper use of earphones, which directly ring the eardrums, can cause noise-induced hearing loss. Experts have identified the duration of earphone use and volume as contributing factors to noise-induced hearing loss. The longer you use your earphones and the louder you turn them up, the more likely you are to suffer from noise-induced hearing loss. Therefore, it’s important to maintain appropriate volume and duration when using earphones.
Noise-canceling technology has a greater effect on users who listen to music in a lot of noise. Listening to music or video in a noisy space requires maintaining a high volume, which can lead to noise-induced hearing loss. For this problem, noise-canceling technology can cancel out ambient noise and allow you to hear sounds at lower volumes. The idea is to avoid the high volumes that are often cited as the cause of noise-induced hearing loss. The reduced volume will return some degree of ear health to the earphone user. Capitalizing on the benefits of noise cancellation, in July 2019, Sony, a major Japanese electronics company, advertised its noise-canceling earphones with the slogan “Lower the volume, lower your hearing age.” The idea that the lower volume brought about by noise cancellation will lead to better ear health seems irrefutable.
In addition, noise canceling technology is used for a better listening experience for the individual. In fact, if you look at the reviews of earphones with noise-canceling technology, you will find that they provide a good listening experience. Apple’s AirPods Pro are so good at canceling noise that they even eliminate the thumping sound in your ears when you walk with them on. Some users even say they make you feel like you’re floating in space. Commercially available noise-canceling technology is said to be 90 to 99 percent effective. That’s enough to reduce the noise of a fighter jet taking off and landing to the rustle of leaves, and it certainly has its advantages when it comes to creating an environment where you can focus on your music.
However, experts say that current noise-canceling technology isn’t perfect, as it can’t completely eliminate noise in every range. This is known as selective cancelation. It’s known that it can’t eliminate sounds in the very low range and the high range above 1300 Hz. This means that while it can eliminate most of the sounds in the world, some will remain. So, what happens to the sounds that don’t get removed? If noise-canceling technology removes sounds in the low, mid, and high frequencies, the ultra-low frequencies are not removed and are still audible to the ear. This makes the ultra-low frequencies that you normally don’t hear very loud seem relatively loud. This relatively loud infrasound can cause a feeling of dizziness when climbing a tall building, or even motion sickness in sensitive people. Current noise-canceling technology has these technical limitations.
Noise canceling technology isn’t just a technical issue. It can also pose safety issues for users. When we listen to music while walking down the street, sometimes we don’t realize that a car is coming up behind us and are startled by the sound of a horn. The idea is that using earphones while walking creates a lack of awareness, which can contribute to an increase in pedestrian accidents. In fact, this is one of the problems that has been a concern since the development of electronics and the popularization of earphones.
This problem is likely to be exacerbated by noise-canceling earphones, which eliminate ambient noise. This is because the noise canceling technology will eliminate the sounds you hear while wearing the earphones, and the lack of perception will be even greater. Of course, manufacturers will also include a feature that lets you hear your surroundings through the microphone. This allows you to hear sounds as if you’re not wearing earphones. However, this is unlikely to have a significant impact on reducing accidents. If users always leave the ambient sound feature turned on around the road, this may solve the problem. However, turning off noise-canceling technology in a high-traffic environment and listening to the world around you negates the benefits of noise-canceling technology, and you don’t want to hear the noise of cars. However, you never know when or where an accident will happen, and it’s not feasible to travel with noise canceling and then turn it off again just in time for an accident. Some regulation seems necessary to ensure the safety of pedestrians and noise-canceling earphones.
Aristotle once said that “man is a political animal.” This means that although we exist as individuals, we are constantly in relationship with others. He believed that only humans are capable of doing good through communication and coordination in relationships with others. However, the current society seems to be moving in the opposite direction of Aristotle’s words, and this has recently been talked about as an important social problem. Excessive individualization. We have new terms such as “solo dining” and “solo drinking”. This is because people are becoming more comfortable eating alone, watching movies alone, and drinking alone. Eating alone means that you don’t have to scramble to decide on a menu, which is an advantage when it comes to choosing a movie, especially if you have multiple tastes. Communicating and coordinating with others seems to be a chore now.
The rise of earphones has been a major concern in this disconnection. When you plug in your earbuds and look at your phone anywhere, you can become disconnected from the society you’ve been living in for a while. In particular, the rise of noise canceling will have a much greater impact than earphones, as it will block out all external sounds. From the moment you put on a pair of earphones with noise canceling, you won’t be able to hear what someone is saying until they tap you on the shoulder, and you will only be able to communicate with them through your mobile device. The constant interaction with other people in society is greatly interrupted by noise canceling. This can lead to a situation where the constant social interaction that distinguishes humans from other living beings is limited by technology.
Another problem is along the lines of the “judgment of King Thamus” in Plato’s Phaedrus. Technology developed for our convenience can actually limit our abilities. One of the benefits of noise-canceling earphones is that they provide a better listening experience: they provide a quiet environment so that when you listen to music or watch a video, you only hear the original sound. People who have used noise-canceling earphones have reported that it’s easier to concentrate when they’re working on a project or reading a book because the outside world is blocked out. This can be a huge benefit for tasks that require a lot of concentration, like studying. But the problem comes when you get used to it. The quiet environment that noise canceling provides is a very special one that doesn’t exist in the real world. You’ll be able to focus on a piece of music, a video, or whatever you’re doing without much effort. In the same way that coffee, a known stimulant, can make it difficult for some people to focus on their work, noise canceling can make it harder to concentrate in a normal, noisy environment.
Noise-canceling technology is currently evolving beyond earphones and headphones to be used in homes, cars, and other living spaces. This means that noise isolation will become increasingly ubiquitous. As noise-canceling technology improves and becomes more widespread, we’ll be living in less noisy environments, and the social disconnection and distraction we talked about earlier may not be limited to earphones.
While the benefits of noise reduction are significant, we must also consider the safety, social, and human performance issues that may arise. Before noise canceling technology is advanced and applied to various areas of human life, we need to think deeply about these issues and consider them fully.
