Welcome to the future of noise cancellation

This blurring of the lines between audio devices and health devices appears to be becoming a trend across the industry. “We really want to make sure we take care of our customers’ hearing,” says Miikka Tikander, head of audio at Helsinki-based Bang & Olufsen. Tikander emphasizes recent data on the decline of hearing health in young adults and reports that manufacturers placed a lot of emphasis on ANC and hearing health in the beginning. AES headset technology conference in Espoo, Finland, in August.

“Apple has a big lead in this area,” he says. “We want to make sure our headphones can fit, make that choice [on when to block out sound] on your behalf, if you allow it, of course. Some people don’t like this idea, but if there is a noisy event in your environment, the headphones can take care of that, just tone it down a bit and get you back to normal listening once you’re away from that noise.

Enter the “sound bubble”

Hearvana AI is a startup looking to go much further than AirPods’ current suite of noise-canceling and ambient noise features. Co-founded by Shyam Gollakota, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, and two of his students, Malek Itani and Tuochao Chen, Hearvana recently raised $6 million in a pre-seed round which included none other than Amazon’s Alexa Fund.

One of the startup’s first big innovations was “semantic hearing,” which was the first project tackled about three years ago. The team built a hardware prototype – a pair of over-ear headphones with six microphones on the headband, connected to an Orange Pi microcontroller – to test a model that had been trained to recognize 20 different types of ambient sounds. This included things like sirens, car horns, birdsong, crying babies, alarm clocks, pets, and people talking, then allowed the user to isolate, for example, a person’s voice as a “spotlight” and block all other frequencies.

“So I go to the beach and I want to listen to only the sounds of the ocean and not people talking next to me, or I’m in the house vacuuming but I still want to listen to people knocking at the door or important sounds, like a baby crying,” says Gollakota, who lives in Seattle. “And that’s what we solved first. It was the difference between a vacuum cleaner and a door knock. They sound quite different, don’t they?”