Ask HN: Is active music cancelation possible?
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Any audio engineers out there? I don't know enough about waveforms, but I was wondering if it might be possible to combine active noise cancelation techniques (as in Airpods or other headphones) with music fingerprinting and waveform inversion in order to make headphones that can cancel out music?
For example, let's you say you want to go to a coffee shop, but don't like the music that they play. Regular active noise cancelation headphones can filter out some of the background noise already, but what if they could also recognize the song that's playing (using existing fingerprinting techniques), download it, invert the waveform and then use the microphone to measure delay and frequency shifts in real time and try to destructively cancel it out? (Only for the headphones wearer, not the actual source of the music.
My hope is that while regular noise cancelation works best on repetitive waveforms (like an engine hum or an electrical whine) because it's limited to what the mic hears in real time, having the exact song downloaded ahead of time would allow you to more easily apply the corrections in sync with the waveform.
Is that conceivable?