How do noise cancelling headphones actually work?
In: Engineering
All sounds are waves. So what happens if you have a wave that would normally be high meet a wave that is normally low? Well they would combine and cancel eachother out at that point.
What noise canceling headphones do is they use a mic to pick up sounds and they play the same sounds but inverted so that at each peak of the original sound there is a valley on the inverted wave, and at each valley of the original sound there is a peak.
Because headphones are a a pretty closed system you dont have to really worry about what happens outside of the point where each wave cancels out, and the point where things cancel out doesn’t move so you don’t have account for that.
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