Now, If Only They Could Make The Noisy Child Disappear!
In "Would Somebody Turn That Noisy Child Off!" Alexandra Frean reports on the latest in noise-cancelling technology:

A REMOTE control that allows you to switch off annoying noises could be available soon. The gadget – the size of a mobile phone – will allow you to zap the sounds of bickering children, thundering traffic, pounding road diggers, barking dogs or twittering colleagues.

The sleek, high-tech silencer, called the Mute, uses technology created for use in hearing aids. It sends a signal via a wireless connection to two little “buds”, which users stick in their ears.

All they have to do is point the remote at anything and it will filter out the sound coming from it.

The Mute, which is still in development, was created for the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID) to help people with hearing difficulties to screen out background noise that can interfere with their understanding of the spoken word. But its creators soon recognised that its applications could be far wider.

Chris Vanstone, of Human Beans, the design consultancy behind the Mute, said: “We wanted to create a product that could help everyone to manage the noise around them. The world is getting noisier all the time. It is twice as loud now as 50 years ago.”

He said that the Mute would come into its own in, say, a noisy pub or an office with a digger outside.

Neil Thomas, of the RNID, said that the Mute works by “sampling”, or recording, the sound that the user wants to screen out so that it can identify the shape of the sound wave. “It then inverts the sampled signal and plays it upside down over the noise that is coming in and they cancel each other out.”