Enjoy the Silence: Noise Control with Smartphones

While a certain sound serves a purpose to someone, for others, the same sound could be noise. Specifically, an alarm sound would be necessary for someone to wake up and start the day, while it would be an unwanted sound for people sharing the same room, who need not wake up as early. Noise cancellation is useful in this scenario, but most existing techniques require costly equipments (e.g., high quality speakers or microphones) or devices that are uncomfortable to wear during sleep. We thus explore the possibility of using only commodity smartphones to achieve active noise control and present Virtual Earplugs. As most people own a smartphone that include a microphone and speakers, and has an alarm clock feature, we believe our system could be easily used in practice. We highlight the technical challenges in realizing our vision and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach using our preliminary prototype. Our results indicate that we can reduce the alarm sound by up to 19~dB in only 2.1~seconds of processing delay.