Hyundai Sees Airpods as Quiet Car Option

Next-Gen Luxury Cars: Enhanced Noise-Canceling for Rear Seats.

Digital noise-canceling technology is a popular feature in high-end cars, but Hyundai is looking to revolutionize this for their vehicles, like the Genesis G90. Rather than engaging a car’s speakers for cancelling out disruptive sound, the company wants to transfer the primary responsibility to your earphones.

An uncovering by CarBuzz at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) reveals that Hyundai and Kia are in the process of creating a noise cancellation system likely to refine the rear-seat amusement experience, canceling out surrounding noises inside the motor vehicle. Although the concept is close to existing technologies, what makes it distinct is the manner in which the regular principles are effectively utilized.

This patent outlines a technique for observing ambient sound close to the passengers’ ears via in-ear microphones combined with existing cabin-mounted microphones. This will enable the digital processor to more precisely determine the best noise-canceling frequencies and subsequently play the improved sound of noise cancellation both through the earpods and the automobile’s audio system.

The utilization of earpods is clearly delineated in the patent, which leads us to think that this system will mainly be used to improve the listening experience for those passengers who might be enjoying multimedia on the go. Earpieces connected via Airpods or Bluetooth presently provide a commonly adopted solution to this problem, and the licensure explained in the document can be seen as a natural continuation of that technology.

The primary benefit of this innovation is that the sound coming from the passengers’ vicinity can now be gauged at their own ears, not just by microphones placed in various areas of the vehicle. This makes it possible for the earpods and vehicle’s audio system to customize their outputs for a better noise reduction outcome.

Incorporated into the design is a remarkable level of intelligence; by discerning the placement of the earpod mics, the car audio system can tweak itself to provide superior noise suppression. Moreover, the sound output produced by the speakers and earphones is modified based on discernment of other passengers’ speech compared to plain environmental sounds, either augmenting or reducing the magnitude of their voices relative to the surrounding individuals.

“Noise cancellation is based on the concept of destructive sound wave interference. This means that a sound processor takes in the ambient noise through a microphone, processes the sound to create an inverted waveform, and then plays these inverted soundwaves through speakers to counteract the original soundwaves that created the noise. In this way, the two soundwaves cancel each other out, reducing the perceived noise.”

Today’s technology permits to construct this degree of processing capacity into headphones. Nonetheless, most automobiles equipped with this characteristic monitor the entirety of the cabin noise via shrewdly situated microphones before offsetting it by emitting standard inverted sounds through the speakers of the audio system. In spite of this, a definite degree of ambient sound commonly gets past the digital sound processors. Consequently, Hyundai has advanced this technology further.

Not alone is this the most recent advancement in noise cancellation, GM have also been laboring on a system for convertibles and roofless autos that could be put into practice in near future.