One of the main aspects that users check before purchasing a new pair of headphones certainly concerns the noise cancellation. When it comes to the active one, the advantages are clear: it is in fact possible to completely block the noise of the surrounding world.
This allows you to concentrate more on a call without any disturbance or perhaps to better listen to your favorite music. In reality, in addition to this, there is also the possibility of listening to surrounding sounds while wearing headphones. Everything can happen in a very clear way thanks to some methods such as Apple’s “transparency” or perhaps theAmbient Sound by Sony.
The problem is that all the surrounding sounds, once these modes are activated, penetrate the headphones and consequently the listener’s ears. Starting from this basis, a new technology designed specifically for earphones and headphones of all kinds appears to be under development.
The headphones of the future will allow you to select which sound to let in from the outside
It will be the users themselves choose the sound that will penetrate inside your earphones. In Washington, university researchers are working on some deep learning algorithms that will allow them to select which sounds to listen to in real time.
The new dedicated technology will be called “semantic hearing“. Semantic listening will allow you to capture audio sending it to the connected smartphonefrom which it will be possible to delete all environmental sounds except those that you choose to keep.
There will be 20 classes of sounds from which users will be able to choose: it will be possible to delete sirens, speeches, bird chirps or crying children. This is only a small part of what can be excluded from the listening. Obviously creating an artificial intelligence that is able to distinguish these sounds is absolutely not simple and this is why it is a real challenge.
In fact, neural algorithms will have to process sounds in less than a hundredth of a second, all based on a cloud. The technology will also have to take care of taking delays into account. At the moment this new invention is apparently having problems distinguishing singing from simple speech and it is for reasons like this that it is not known when this innovation will see the light.
