Noise-cancelling headphones that let you hear a 'bubble' around you, but block everything else? Sounds great, and researchers have developed the tech

Sound Bubble tech from Washington University

(Image credit: Chen et al./Nature Electronics)

Sound Bubble adds extra microphones to sense distance
Filter unwanted audio by proximity
Still very much in the future-tech file

The best noise cancelling headphones are brilliant things, but there's still plenty of room for improving what active noise cancellation can do. And a new system could make today's transparency and conversation awareness modes look positively prehistoric.

The tech comes from engineers at the University of Washington. We've reported on their work before: earlier this year they unveiled a system called Target Speech Hearing that could tell who you were looking at and prioritize their voice. And now they've got another great idea: the Sound Bubble.

'Sound bubble' headphones demo - YouTube

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How the Sound Bubble could change the way you cancel

The name Sound Bubble may bring to mind images of a kid-friendly Bluetooth speaker. But this bubble is a lot more interesting than that. As NewAtlas.com reports, it's essentially an ANC system with six extra microphones, and those mics are connected to a neural network.

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That network is the key. It analyzes the audio from the mics to determine the distance of sound sources, and that enables you to set cancellation not just by frequencies but by proximity too. It can block faraway sounds and amplify closer ones, enabling you to hear what you want much more easily.

If you've ever struggled to hear your friends in a busy space, you can see the appeal of a Sound Bubble: by setting your noise cancellation so it doesn't filter your friends but still eliminates the chat from other tables, or other unwanted noise, it's exactly the kind of feature I'd gladly swap my existing earbuds to have.

It's also considerably more practical than the last version, which used a bunch of small robots to listen to the room you're in. Fun, but hardly ideal in your local dive bar.

This is still very much in the jetpacks and flying cars file of tech that looks amazing but you can't yet buy. But given the pace of change – and the fierce competition – in the ANC audio market, it might not be long before we're sticking something very similar on or over our ears.

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Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now and her next book, about pop music, is out in 2025. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind.