Does anyone know where to follow this project, or perhaps if there's a Kickstarter or something? I can't seem to find anything outside of this one article. I would pay very good money for something like this. Ground floor apartments on major streets are awful. :-(
Yes, this should be on a crowdfunded project asap if the prototype in the video was really functional and no simulated sounds were added. I'd buy it in an instant!
Maybe I'll attempt to promote it on Reddit to help with gaining more 'mass-appeal' traction.
Yes, and there's whether it actually works IRL. I think it's feasible to have something like the concept, but there are quite a few hiccups along the way -- I'm no audio expert, but I suspect that a single microphone/speaker location may be unable to cancel satisfactorily the incoming sound field through the window. Also, Loud noises creep in through various places, so if your window is quite good already you many not get much improvement.
But a good concept and hard work (and hope) usually lead to quite good products...
I.e. noise cancellation in building is usually approached through "get better insulation", not through the plausibly cheaper "let's spread a speaker/mic array inside/outside to cancel what's coming form outside".
I've done quite a bit of signal processing in my day. Audio, image/computer vision, radio comms, etc. This product strikes me as not terribly honest for a few reasons:
Geometry
The mic/speaker assembly are in the middle of the window but the window has substantial size relative to the dimensions of the room and the distance the listener is from the device. What this means is that you have a multipath problem; the original sound can come through the whole window (even the wall!) but the canceling sound can only eminate from the speaker.
If you draw a straight line from the original noise source, through the device and from there it happens to head towards your ears, this can work. If not things will get jumbled up and it might cancel or it might actually reinforce the noise, rather than cancelling it.
A speaker is a device that works as a derivative of the original signal. That means it needs some amount of "advance notice" of the sound in order to be able to create the proper pressure wave to cancel out said sound. The "advance notice" is usually done by means of some distance between the microphone and the speaker but the device is very thin. Worse, the amount of "advance notice" depends on the frequency of the sound which generally makes it an intractable problem to solve for the transient case.
So what people do is focus on periodic noises like hum, hiss, buzz, rumble, what-have-you. In this case you don't need to make sure that any one peak has it's inverse reproduced perfectly, you only have to ensure that ONE peak is cancelled out by SOME OTHER out of phase peak. If it takes a couple of cycles for the computer to catch on, no big deal that's just a bit of start-up noise. Bose headphones don't IMMEDIATELY make the plane quieter, they just do it so fast that you don't notice the amount of time it takes for the system to warm up. It seems instant even though it's not.
But what this means is that a bunch of the sounds being cancelled out probably wouldn't be cancelled out quite so nicely as a lot of them are transients like the bottles breaking or the construction site or the park.
I'd really love to be wrong about this. There's a joke that goes "An engineer will tell you it's impossible until you show him how to do it. Then he'll say it's obvious." It's entirely possible that this guy has figured something out that the rest of us haven't. But I will remain skeptical until I can actually put my hands on one and benchmark it for myself
The mic/speaker assembly are in the middle of the window
but the window has substantial size relative to the
dimensions of the room and the distance the listener is
from the device.
For what it's worth, the pictures in the article show a series of rings around the device that significantly increase its surface area, a component that is not present on the device in the video.
Yeah I'm not optimistic about those. They're clearly too small to be electromagnetic drivers (think magnets and coils) so best-case they're active piezo devices that are epoxied on (need to have a good bond) turning the whole window into a radiative speaker. Sadly those are limited to high frequency sound only (several kHz and up) so they wouldn't do much good for anything other than perhaps the bottle noise.
This is incredibly well written and 100% on-point with my own personal experiences. This paragraph stood out the most to me:
"As a techie individual contributor in a larger company, I could go to work everyday and execute 99% predictably. As a founder, I had to find ways to plead your case over and over — to employees, investors, candidates, advertisers, users — and I got rejected a lot. For an introvert, the amount of pleading and subsequent rejection came as quite a shock."
That's probably one of the most difficult adjustments I've had to make moving from 16 years of plain-old-coding into being a founder.
The author never used any of these adjectives to describe himself (except entrepreneur, which he is entitled to use since he started his own company). I agree with you that they are highly annoying terms to use and diminish our profession. That, however, does not excuse your hostile and unnecessary comment.
This is a great article, Sidu. All of your points speak true to what I have learned going through the same process. I've only been doing the business thing for about 10 months, but already I notice a difference in perspective when speaking to non-entrepreneur engineers. Thanks for writing this.
This all happened during the final negotiations of our round. That last bit takes obnoxiously long as lawyers have to talk to one another. That was the awkward chasm we fell into: running out of cash as the final documents for the round were being finalized.
It's funny that you mention that, as that is my personal beef with many startups as well. Funding is not a measure of success; revenue is. However, this article is not about revenue. It's about the funding process. Talking about our revenue (which we didn't have at the time, but we do have now) would have been off topic.
Each company is different but I think the way you start a company is usually the way it continues. You can't work 100 weeks then suddenly switch to something sane.
