This year my project is the ANC App. ANC stands for active noise canceling which is a common form of noise-canceling headphones used in many modern ANC headphones today. My original idea was to create a software version of ANC that would allow you to generate an inverse wave of the external sound and therefore create a quieter environment. It would allow the user to plug in any headphones they use and generate ANC, mimicking the concept of today’s more expensive ANC headphones. The program would gather data from the microphone attached to the headphones and play out the inverse way through the headphones then canceling out any surrounding sound. The goal of this project was to not only provide a cheaper alternative but also to make ANC more widely available and accessible (See more about the ANC App on my project profile page).
But after researching ANC as well as soundwaves, I found that there were many logistics that I needed to figure out in order to make it work. I’d already eliminated the hardware factor by allowing users to input whichever headphones they have on hand, so my project focused mainly on the software component. The issues I found with this project included my limited knowledge of coding, I recently started coding this year, but I do plan to continue learning to code. A variety of headphones that the user could have, this entails the user having earbuds or over-ear headphones, with the two different types of headphones working better with different types of ANC as well as positioning of the microphone which could potentially mess with the ANC resulting in inverse sound waves not matching with its surrounding sound companion.
Overall, I generally found this project to be more of a learning experience for myself. Regardless of all the issues, I faced throughout the project I definitely learned a lot more about soundwaves, their related laws and principles, and about ANC in general. I also learned the importance of thoughtfully planning projects and processes as well as staying more organized.
For this year’s i2 showcase, I hope to present my ideas and thoughts behind this app and dive into the project planning process. I think that the concepts behind ANC are really interesting and I want to allow more people to learn about the system behind noise cancelation.