Could you noise cancel a room, or even an area in the outdoors?
In: Engineering
Not for multiple listeners unless the source of the noise is a single point and your cancelling speakers can emulate that single point – as an example, the noise cancelling sound wave for listener 1 will not reach listener 2 at the correct time to cancel the noise, but could instead amplify it if it’s in phase.
For a single listener, though, any size space can work as long as the cancelling speakers are closer to you than the source of the noise. The math is difficult but computers are good with math.
[this guy](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCW5HUkrr-o) explain it in a funny way why you can’t scale it up.
the problem is that sound propagate in circle, think like throwing a rock into a lake, it create circle waves.
you can create a counter-wave in a point in space between you and the noise source to counter that but that counter-wave will be a circle wave too so it will cancel noise for you but will be another noise source for anyone positioned in a different point.
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