Can electronic hearing protectors help improve the ability to hear and communicate in a noisy environment?
Most likely you have heard about active headsets and noise canceling earmuffs. In theory the noise cancellation technology works by creating a negative sound wave for every noise (a series of sound waves), and thereby successfully cancel all noise for a perfectly quiet environment. Unfortunately this scenario is much more wishful thinking than reality. In order to be able to make the computations instantly, as we walk around in a changing noise environment, we would need a computer on a cart. Todays active or electronic headsets therefore are compromises that either are designed for specific noise environments, such as an airplane cockpit, or use some sort of filtering technique. The latter technique seeks to eliminate much more of the noise environment than of the speech, in order to improve the speech to noise relationship. Electronic earmuffs can successfully eliminate impact noise, such as gunfire, and significantly contribute towards the ability to hear and communicate while on th
