In 2023, I moved to a new house in Paris with my mom. I never lived inside Paris before and I discovered the terrible curse of living in front of an active avenue with hundreds of cars driving every minute. My bedroom is literally in front of the avenue and I’m always listening to the noise of the cars and trucks, day and night. Because I accumulated so much frustration, I decided to solve this problem with an active- noise cancelling solution. This could help me sleep and focus peacefully.

In this world, there are 2 types of noise cancelling solutions: active and passive. Passive noise cancellation is the most obvious one. No computer, no electronics, no program: only a thick wall of concrete, double-glazed windows or even acoustic foam. This type of passive noise cancelling solution is great but often unaesthetic, voluminous and sometimes expensive. Active noise cancelling on the other hand is a program or computer based system that uses the physical properties of sound waves to reduce noise; At the heart of this system is a phenomenon called “destructive interference”. Imagine you and a friend are holding a cord, you give an upward impulse to the cord and at the same time, your friend gives a downward impulse. When the impulsions, or waves, will meet at the middle of the cord, they will cancel each other out. The same process is applied with soundwaves: they have a certain frequency and by sending in the right direction the same wave but inverted, we cancel the sound waves and you’re done with noise.

Now, it works on paper in reality, it’s harder to make it work in an open environment because sound waves aren't always coming at you in a straight line, and they often are “mixed up”. The challenges here are to be able to record at an instant the sound, then use a program to decompose the sound in order to have each sound wave separated ( sinusoidal sound waves) and send in the right direction the inverted waves. All of this in less than a second…

the future of the project: I still don’t know what I’ll do with the knowledge I’ll learn and skills I’ll develop in this project. Perhaps use it for my future studies, or develop a resilient system I could implement in other spaces, or maybe sell it ? Who knows ?