Let’s face it: Workplaces can sometimes be a nightmare, especially when you’re working on something that requires your full attention. To make matters even worse, your colleagues can be distracting — maybe they’re having loud conversations or their cell phones are constantly chirping. What if there was a way to block all that noise? We are happy to inform you that researchers at Boston University have just unveiled an “acoustic metamaterial” that is capable of blocking all sound.

Xin Zhang, a professor at the College of Engineering, and Reza Ghaffarivardavagh, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering placed a high tech speaker into one end of a PVC pipe and they cranked it up loud. What did they hear? Absolutely, nothing!

What’s the secret? Did they use some kind of sound proof at the end of the pipe? Actually nothing of sort, what they did was, they used a ring like structure, created to mathematically perfect specifications, for cutting out sounds while maintaining airflow.

“Today’s sound barriers are literally thick heavy walls,” says Ghaffarivardavagh. Although noise-mitigating barricades, called sound baffles, can help drown out the whoosh of rush hour traffic or contain the symphony of music within concert hall walls, they are a clunky approach not well suited to situations where airflow is also critical. Imagine barricading a jet engine’s exhaust vent–the plane would never leave the ground. Instead, workers on the tarmac wear earplugs to protect their hearing from the deafening roar.

The mathematically designed, 3D-printed acoustic metamaterial is shaped in such a way that it sends incoming sounds back to where they came from. [Photo: Cydney Scott/Boston University]

They dubbed an “acoustic meta-material,” the ring was printed from a mathematically modelled design, shaped in such a way that it can catch certain frequencies passing through the air and reflect them back toward their source. Typical acoustic panelling works differently, absorbing sound and turning the vibrations into heat. But what’s particularly trippy is that this muffler is completely open. Air and light can travel through it–just sound cannot.

Acoustic Metamaterial Noise Cancellation Device

Now that their prototype has proved so effective, the team have some innovative ideas about how their acoustic-silencing metamaterial could go to work making the real world quieter. The implications for architecture and interior design are remarkable, as this new research could be used to build sound proof buildings in noisy cities or they could be stacked to build soundproof yet transparent walls.

“We can design the outer shape as a cube or hexagon, anything really. When we want to create a wall, we will go to a hexagonal shape that can fit together like an open-air honeycomb structure.” says the professor.

Such walls could help contain many types of noises. Even those from the intense vibrations of an MRI machine, Zhang added.

Zhang believes that the possibilities are endless, since the noise mitigation method can be customized to suit nearly any environment: “The idea is that we can now mathematically design an object that can block the sounds of anything.”

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