New Earplugs Won’t Amplify the Sound of Your Own Voice
Wearing earplugs, hearing aids and earphones can make your own voice sound booming, but a new design dampens the din
If you plug your ears, the voices around you become muffled—while yours becomes annoyingly amplified. “It’s like talking with your head in a barrel. Your own voice sounds booming,” says Kévin Carillo, an engineer who specializes in acoustics and vibration at École de Technologie Supérieure in Montreal.
This “occlusion effect” can make devices such as earplugs and hearing aids uncomfortable, and it sometimes dissuades people from using them at all. Now Carillo and his colleagues have created a 3D-printed earplug that dampens these bothersome internal noises, they reported earlier this month at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.
When earplugs, earbuds or hearings aids block, or “occlude,” the outer ear canals, they create closed cavities between themselves and the eardrums. In these cavities, the low-frequency sound waves we routinely make by speaking, chewing and breathing, which propagate through the body’s tissues and bone, will resonate and become amplified before hitting our eardrums.
On supporting science journalism
If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
Previous solutions to this problem tended to be inefficient, uncomfortable or expensive. Researchers had tried developing ventilated earplugs that allow some air to pass through, custom-made plugs that fit deeper into the ear canal and devices that rely on active electronics to cancel out the low-frequency sound. But Carillo and his colleagues wanted to find a simpler, lower-cost approach. The team 3D-printed tiny interconnected…
Read the full article here