Controlling unwanted alarm sound with smartphones

Abstract

While a certain sound serves a purpose to someone, the same sound could be noise to others. Specifically, an alarm sound could be necessary for someone to wake up and start the day, but it could 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 equipment (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 includes a microphone and speakers, and has an alarm clock feature, we believe our system could be easily deployed and 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 Virtual Earplugs reduces the alarm sound by up to 19 dB in only 2.1 seconds of processing delay.