- Doppler Labs isn't interested in blocking out all natural noise and pumping prerecorded sound into your ears. The team wants to change the sounds that are coming in. It wants you to customize your sonic world in exactly the way you want.
Very interesting! I assume once you combine this with speech recognition you'll be able to completely live in a bubble empty of anything censorship worthy, be it opinions you disagree with yourself or maybe even hardcoded autocensors (like swearwords). Finally parents will be able to let their kids on the street without having to worry that they'll hear dangerous words or ideas.
You may be interested in the book Veracity. Similar idea, but implants, not ear buds.
I wonder how well the removal of certain noises will be. I've done some pretty basic audio editing with Audacity, and it seems like systems designed to remove certain sounds is still tricky. There's an effect that can be used to remove a certain sound, but you have to have that sound isolated - and it's still doesn't always work 100% (For example, keyboard clicks are almost impossible to get out, in my experience). It seems like with noise removal, it's not always easy to get just that sound removed; you usually either get to remove that sound and a bit off of others, or get to remove most of that sound. On top of that, it would be tricky to, say, have a program that could remove a chosen sound, like rain or a baby crying, from a drop-down, because they will deviate from a standard preset due to things like pitch and what's between you and the source of that sound (rain on a metal roof sound different from rain on a wooden roof). That would mean, for a lot of cases, you would have to choose the sound manually, and make the app ignore that sound. That means you would have to use something similar to the Noise Removal effect in Audacity where, if you don't get just the sound you want to remove, you end up with everything being slightly distorted.
I'd be perfectly happy just with something as simple as a low-pass filter. That would take care of sirens, babies crying on planes, cats yowling at night. It wouldn't help with the rain-on-a-metal-roof, but I'm not sure I'd want to silence that - it's the cosiest sound EVER :)
I love the sound of rain, too. So much, in fact, that I have an alarm clock that makes that sound when I go to sleep (and it's hard for me to sleep without it!). However, I've met people that have trouble sleeping when it rains. At the same time, it seems like a filter would either not completely remove intended sounds, or remove it and most of all the other sounds. I hope they got some magic, though.
Both interesting and terrifying. Could help coordination in loud places by filtering out most noise and certain voices so that you hear what you need to hear. On the other hand, the possible reverb chamber effect, where you just MUTE people who disagree with you, could be an issue. And the possibility that people would get hit by vehicles because they removed the sound of engines is downright terrifying.
That logic does not hold. The creators, the marketers, and the insurance companies all need to think of it. For instance, similar logic for self-driving cars (that is being debated): since there is no driver, they do not know who is liable when one of them hits a pedestrian - is it the manufacturer for not making the car good enough? Is it the owner for owning it? Never EVER do they spin it as being the pedestrian's fault, even though our current technology (in the parameters that it is approved to run in - clear vision, no rain, dry ground) would see that happen SPECIFICALLY only if someone ran from behind an obstruction - surprise is the only way to cause these issues. Yet they still debate whose life should have priority, and what steps to take, because they cannot allow a machine to purposefully kill or hurt someone no matter what are the circumstances - so they need to have provision for these edge cases that even humans cannot do. They completely disregard the reduction, if not elimination at long term, of road accidents by removing all human factors from driving. They disregard all of the advantages. All of that because the car can't, right now (if ever) deal with some idiot jumping in front of the car - if it does not do anything, the passenger is hurt and that's bad. If it swerves, it most likely will hurt other people and that's bad. And if it swerves and hits something and causes damage and hurts the passenger, that's also bad. So you bet your sweet ass that they are considering this - because the MOMENT someone dies of something preventable by listening, it's going to be blamed on the device that removed that sound from their hearing and not the person itself for turning that sound off. Rule of thumb for companies and corporations: when machines, devices and computers are involved, humans are never EVER the problem - it's always the machine/device's design that failed for not accounting for people who uses it or interact with it like they do. It's also the reason why, barring that, there's warnings for everything about everything - even inhaling paint.
(and of course that's a nightmare for the engineer/programmer/designer stuck at the other end, because 99% of the time they're dealing with idiots)