Noise Canceling Theory

[N3rot0xin]

So i was thinking.. these noise canceling headphones work my basically recording ambient noise and offseting the freqs to cancel out the ambient noise.. My question is this:

 

I have a webcam, that has a built in mic.. Is there a way, no matter how obscure, that I could record the ambient noises with that mic on the webcam, run it thru a software that does the same thing as a noise canceling headphone, and then play it back thru my regular old headset?

 

I don't know of programs that do this, but then again i dont really do a lot with audio and this is just a theory i was thinking about today at work.. 

 

 

[VincentC]

No, that's not how anything works...

[Judahnator]

In theory, this sounds good.

 

In practice, it would have no clue what it is doing. For example, it might over compensate and make the noise-canceling worse then not. Or, it could under-compensate.

And in all likely-hood, the time for the software to process audio plus the time difference between the time sound hits your ears and the mic on the desk will make trying to cancel sound waves impossible.

 

Good idea, but i dont think it would work

[N3rot0xin]

i mean like, i was looking around in Audacity, as thats probably the program that, if any, could do it. But you're right, there would be a time delay and it would be weird.. all i was going to do is have it record and invert and playback all at once. 

[ShearMe]

Actually this is a thing. It just doesn't work that well in domestic use because the background noise isn't as consistent as you think.

There's an effect in audacity that lets you pick a section of the recording as a noise baseline and attempt to remove that from the rest of the recording. Forgot what it's called... Noise something or other.

[N3rot0xin]

I was looking into using some combination of Nyquist scripting in Audacity, seeing if theres an "invert and play back microphone" set of commands

[ShearMe]

It's literally something called background noise removal and should be easy to find. I'd take a screencap if I wasn't on my phone

[Guest]

Actually this is a thing. It just doesn't work that well in domestic use because the background noise isn't as consistent as you think.

There's an effect in audacity that lets you pick a section of the recording as a noise baseline and attempt to remove that from the rest of the recording. Forgot what it's called... Noise something or other.

 

You're not going to believe it, but it's called noise "removal".

[ShearMe]

You're not going to believe it, but it's called noise "removal".

Ninja'd but ha!

[Guest]

Ninja'd but ha!

 

Don't ninja me.