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Name: G
Status: Educator
Age: 40s
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: N/A
Question:
I homeschool a 10 yr. old who will be a full-time student at a local university in the fall. He wants to know how we could build a device that would interfere with strong base sound waves and neutralize them: perhaps using a digital sensor to detect sound wave frequency, the device could then generate another sound wave pattern to interfere destructively with it, reducing or eliminating the previous sound intensity.

I don't have a strong enough physics background to know how to go about doing this. Any help you could offer would be greatly appreciated. My son has me temporarily stumped over this one.


Replies:
I too don't have any expertise in this, but my suspicion is that something like this already exists. I recall hearing about a device that could effectively remove noise from journalist interviews by using something similar to what you describe. I cannot say this ever was actually constructed, perhaps not. Hopefully someone closer to physics can provide more detailed information or a place to go to research this.

Good luck!
Thanks for using NEWTON!
Dr. Rupnik

What you need is a microphone, an inverting amplifier, and a speaker. It's best if the amplifier and speaker don't introduce any phase shift, but this is difficult to arrange.

Tim Mooney


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