ChatterBlocker — Block Distracting Speech at Work

An anonymous reader writes "ChatterBlocker is a PC program that uses digital audio technology to neutralize the sound of speech and other distractions so you can stay focused at work or elsewhere." Personally I just crank the tunes. Anyone know if this actually works or if it's a scam? Or is it just a white noise generator?

Free Speech?

I dunno. Sounds like it would have a chilling effect on free speech [slashdot.org] to me.

Re:Free Speech?

No, it supports the freedom to choose what to listen to.
One does not have an obligation to listen to everybody's use of free speech.

Re:Free Speech?

Oh, phew! I thought it was the sound of my latest deadline whizzing by!

Re:Free Speech?

"Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment..."
"Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment..."
"Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment..."

obvious

Nothing to hear here, move along.

Can you hear what my mouth is saying?

I just keep a bowl of crunchy cereal at my desk AT ALL TIMES.

Earplugs

This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earplugs [wikipedia.org] ought to work just as well, if not better.

Cheaper too I'd suppose.

Re:Earplugs

In his first novel World of Ptaavs (now part of the Three Books of Known Space [amazon.com] omnibus) Larry Niven suggested that over the next couple of centuries people would evolve to be able to more powerfully focus on relevant conversation and filter out noise. The growing population, he suggested, would result in all public spaces being much more full of chatter than now. People would be driven mad if they didn't adapt.

It seems a better solution than earplugs, which would block out everything, even useful sound. But the idea is fanciful, for instead of biological or psychological progress, it seems that these sort of technological advances as described in the article will serve to keep the world around us quiet.

Re:Earplugs

Using different densities & materials, earplugs can (to a degree) be tailored to block certain frequencies.

Also earplugs are generally better at blocking high frequency sounds, while earmuffs are better for the low freq noises (or vice versa, but I think I have it right). And you should wear both if things are going to be really loud.

Re:Earplugs and leet skillz!

I'm interested in these results Larry suggested. My friends and I for the last year have been working on a skill, one that we wondered if it was possible while bored in a lecture one day, where as usual you filter all noise that is irrelevant (the venues in our cases include lecture theaters and filled refectories) and touch type on an assignment or other wise engaging task with the added difficulty of holding a detailed conversation on another topic with some one else. In the beginning it was rather impossible though surprisingly enough it is rather doable as we have found with only a little practice and then a lot of usage to get the words per minute ratio up.

Laptops allow you to be anywhere and we know we can filter noise and information a lot better than is currently done (and with less effort than at least I expected) plus the human brain is perfect for multitasking. I wonder if this sort of thing is indeed the future of at least geekdom, maybe of office space in general?

Re:Earplugs

Actually, as someone who works with a bunch of chatty people, I've found that earplugs do a pretty lousy job at blocking out conversations. The problem is that the best earplugs you can buy at your local drug store only attenuate noise by ~32 decibels. But a typical conversation, at close range, is ~60 decibels. You wind up just blocking out all the low-level background noise (computer fans, air conditioning, ...), leaving the voices even more distinct.

I've found the best solution for me is a pair of headphones that seal pretty well, combined with music. The sealed headphones drop everything, so the music can be much quieter and still drown them out.

I'm actually thinking of picking up a pair of Shure E2C [amazon.com] earbuds for just this purpose. Has anyone got any experience with them? Will they do what I want?

Re:Earplugs

I have the prior generation of these earplug/headphones. A couple things I've learned:

1) You have to stick them WAY inside your ears to get the full effect. It feals like you're poking your brain stem.
2) They work incredibly well.
3) You'll suddenly discover how crappy your home and car speakers are, and how REALLY crappy normal headphones are.

If you're really serious, get a good set of musician ear-moldings. They'll fit the E2C earphones, IIRC, and they're much more comfortable from what I'm told.

Re:Earplugs

I've got the E3c earphones, and I've had them for about a year and a half. I bought them for plane trips, and they're quite good at reducing the overall noise. It's not total silence when you put them in but it is definitely a significant reduction, especially in background noise/talking. As an example, I have to take them out to hear the flight attendant, or someone sitting beside me, but I can typically hear loud noises (e.g. the "ding" for the PA). With music or movies playing you can miss even louder sounds.

As a general recommendation, I've found them to be OK sound quality and good build quality - the cable and connections are still in quite good condition even with regular use over the past 18 months. The E3c model came with a bunch of different "plugs". I find the gray soft rubber ones the most comfortable and best sound reduction, but the harder clear ones the easier to use (i.e. stay in your ears and keep clean). I don't know if the E2cs come with different plugs, I seem to recall that was one of the selling points for the E3cs. The E4cs were recommended to me as a better bass response, which at the time I didn't think was that big of a deal. I still think it might be better for my hearing to skip the louder bass, but that is one area where the E3cs are slightly lacking. The bass response is OK but never stands out (does not compare to even a low end set of good headphones imo).

Just as an aside, I've found that they are somewhat inappropriate for office use. With music playing they will basically silence anyone who might be talking to you directly, potentially even your phone ringing if it's not loud enough. I have a cheap set of normal over-the-ear headphones that do NOT cut out direct noise that I use when I'm in an office environment, that's always been good enough for me.

Re:Earplugs

I also have the E2Cs, and I didn't have the problem of feeling like i was sticking things too far into my ear- of course, I've been shooting rifles since I was six which means that I've been using ear plugs since i was six, and am quite accustomed to them. In my work environment, there's a fair bit of background noise (about twelve computers, a large refrigerator, a fossilized air conditioner compressor, three centrifuges going on and off) and at the time i bought the phones, two coworkers whose constant, shrill, incredibly loud laughter reminded me of hyenas. The Shures saved my bloody sanity until i got the promotion and PHB said I had to "be available to answer employee questions at all times." Fortunately one hyena-woman had left by then... They worked really well for my needs, a mix of constant background hum and sharp high-frequency outbursts, though the high pitch stuff still came through enough to detect.

My problem with the E2C actually was that in combination with my Rio Carbon I could not turn the music volume down _low_ enough to be 100% comfortable all the time. I couldn't listen to rock music with them, for example, because I found it painfully loud. This is not a problem for most people, I'm told :)

useless

I downloaded the demo, turned on all the options, set the reverb to high, and now I can't concentrate on anything at all. This thing is totally useless.

Worst. Article. Ever.

From the FAQ:

How does ChatterBlocker work?

        ChatterBlocker masks unwanted office chatter using a soothing blend of nature sounds, music and anti-chatter voices.

WOW. MINDBLOWING.

Re:Worst. Article. Ever.

So basically they charge 35 dollars for a bunch of wave files and some marketing on drool proof paper.

You have to admit it's quite ingenious.

Noise cacellation?

The way this is done in noise cancelling headphones is by recording background sound and right away outputting a signal such that the output destructively interferes with the background noise.

IMHO if this is just software, it's a scam. You need hardware for this, because you want the microphones to be close to the ears (i.e. on the outside of the headphones).

Re:Noise cacellation?

Hey, that's simple enough. If the boss is screaming from the other end of the corridor, you just put the microphone there. If the corridor is long enough, that gives you a plenty of time for the OS to get the sound at the signal propagation speed, while it reaches your ears from air. Then, you'll just need to tune the system to model the time-frequency response distortions through mic, corridor sound reflections and the pecularities of your amplifiers and speakers.

Re:Noise cacellation?

It seems that nobody in this thread understands the problems with noise cancellation. Of course it is trivial to build an analog circuit that substracts the signal from a small microphone from the signal that goes to the headphone speaker. Unfortunately, that won't work. The problem is that a headphone typically has a very complicated frequency response resulting from the resonances in de closed volume between the eardrum and the headphone loudspeaker, and the attempts of the headphone designer to compensate for these resonances. (see for example here [soundstageav.com]). The net effect is that the impulse response of the headphone/ear system with respect to electrical signals going into the speaker is about 1.5 ms. That means that even if you have full knowledge of the interaction of the headphone with a particular ear, you need to know what sound wave to cancel 1.5 milliseconds in advance. In this time, the sound can travel about 50 cm, which is obviously more than the 1-2 cm between the headphone speaker and the microphone.

So to make an effective noise-cancellating headphone, you have to compromise on sound quality in order to give it a quicker impulse response. Then you will have to accept that you will never be able to effectively cancel out high frequencies (above 1 kHz or so). Finally, you will still need to build some kind of lowpass filter such that you won't substract the higher frequencies with the wrong phase and thus increase the noise rather than decrease it. With all these constraints, you can be happy if you achieve 10 dB reduction.

perfect

After playing with it for a few minutes, I think I've found the perfect setting to keep people away from my desk--turn everything off except for Cypress Goats.

pure snakeoil

snakeoil ...

Quote:
"ChatterBlocker includes bell sound loops that can be used as periodic reminders to breathe"

now, come on ... people buying this may be stupid. But reminding them to breathe ?

From the site:

ChatterBlocker masks unwanted chatter using a soothing blend of nature sounds, music and "anti-chatter" voices. It also offers mindfulness meditation tracks intended to increase concentration, reduce distractibility and minimize the stress response to office noise.

Right, I want to block out chattering voices with anti-chatter-voices! Brilliant!

Something else

Personally I just crank the tunes. Anyone know if this actually works or if it's a scam? Or is it just a white noise generator?

Or maybe it's simply employer stupidity?
People use to talk each other as an expession of being human for social relationshinps and for knowledge transfers.
But those employers could be more interested in bodies rather than in minds.
In this latter case, the software is very useful.

Try the Demo!

Personally I just crank the tunes. Anyone know if this actually works or if it's a scam? Or is it just a white noise generator?

Why did'nt you try the demo? I did, and this stupid program does nothing more than generate sound. This way you have even more noise around you.

Really, worst article ever.

Speech Recognition

Finally, speech recognition comes of age. This artificial intelligence recognizes 99.9% of incoming speech, and generates appropriate responses.

Uber-Parent Is Part of the Problem

Personally I just crank the tunes.

Good job, you boorish oaf. Now you've contributed to the problem, and your co-workers probably hate you. Or you're using headphones, and going deaf.

Another useful feature

From the web site: "ChatterBlocker includes bell sound loops that can be used as periodic reminders to breathe"!

Hardware version

My computer came with a hardware version. It sits near the back and blows air out a vent to create speech-canceling noise.

Taco Taco Taco

If anyone has ever wondered if Taco and the other editors even bother clicking on the links in the summaries, here's your answer: "Anyone know if this actually works or if it's a scam? Or is it just a white noise generator?"

Anyone who's taken even 15 seconds to look into this will instantly know the answer.

But does it....

run on linux?

Free advertizing?

I don't suppose this 'Anonymous Reader' who submitted this is an employee of the ChatterBlocker company looking or free ad space on Slashdot...?

I call bullshit.Slashdot article -very- misleading

The article describes this software in all respects to be a Noise-canceling program, which it is most definitely not. I downloaded Chatter Blocker demo, and was greeted with this window [imageshack.us]. This program may be for some people, but the article labels it as a completely different animal. And yes, it is a white noise (and other noise) generator

Just read the "background papers"...

... and honestly I would predict that it is just easier getting a good set of Koss headphones and some classical or random music that is instrumental.

Studies have show (I don't have a link atm) that classical music even raises your productivite, that means more World of Warcraft time for me!

Not a scam, but....

...when I'm irratated at work, even silence can be distracting.

And there are those who have just the right irratating, cutting thru anything (even head phones blasting) voice sound, change in volume, starts to say something five different ways before they stumble it out, etc..that you just have to know ain't nobody going to custom create sounds to drown these unique voices out.

But this is not a scam as I'm sure it is capable of smoothing over common chatter. I think what helps me to believe this is that I saw some short clip on TV about movie sound effects. Ever notice that background murmer of people talking in a scene where there are lots of people but you really only hear the actors in focus? This is only one example, but there is at least one company that does nothing but deal with teh talent that is hired for these background effects.

My reasoning is that if you can create such chatter that is not so distracting, you probably have a good idea as to what is distracting and that should make for a good start at address the problem,

Now if you check out the site, you'll see they are far from being new to the sound industry.

It may not work as well as you like against those uniquly distracting voices but for alot of offices it probably would help.

As to mind focusing sounds, this is also been researched. I myself sometimes listed to Yani to help life my mental state and I read something where during the playing of some mathmatically/logically correct classical piece (bach or batoveen sp?) it is difficult to lie.

I suppose the trick is to take the distracting noice and add such pleasing noise to the mmix that blends the distraction into the acceptable.

I've noticed some music works better than other at drowning out specific office noise.

Someone saw me with head phones on and ask: Rocking Out? I said: No! Drowning out....

what a joke!

"soothing nature sounds" I think not...

Crank the tunes: no good

With music playing, I can't concentrate fully on anything else (I wish I'd realised this *before* graduating from university!)

What I'd need to improve my concentration in a chattery environment, I guess is a constant background noise which is ignorable yet chatter blends into.

But then, since I choose not to work from home because the chatter is condusive to productivity, I don't need it.

Noise Cancelling headphones

For whatever reason, either inside my office or right outside is a favorite spot for "heated discussion". Whenever I need to concentrate, I put on my pair of these:

http://www.epinions.com/content_178219683460 [epinions.com]

set my music low and I can get some work done. Yeah, these aren't the fancy Bose $300 headphones but Wal Mart (used?) sells them for less than $30 and the DO work. They're light, (the noise cancelling stuff is mid-cord, not in the phones themselves), well padded, comfortable to wear for hours and if you're stuck in the server room, essential.

I've tried the JVC version of the same thing, with all the cancelling stuff in the phones themselves but they lacked padding and didn't seal as well. For around $30, they're hard to beat; oh yeah and they're a lot more effective than "Computer Cooling Fan" sounds.

Perfect for anybody taking tech support calls...

This is wonderful, never hear those complaining people again. Make sure the entire technical call center has these.

In the old days...

... we simply used walls for that.

Developer's reply

ChatterBlocker uses nature sounds, music and background "anti-chatter" voices (or "walla") to mask the intelligibility of unwanted conversations. It does not use noise cancellation (which, as has been pointed out, would not work using speakers and has limited effectiveness at voice frequencies).

It's obvious from your feedback that we did not make this clear enough. We discuss this in detail on our FAQ page, in the "More Info" page and in our white papers, but we have now added additional clarification to our home page. I thought I was doing a good thing by taking off my engineering hat and putting on my marketing hat, focusing on the benefits not the technology, but obviously this has derailed the discussion toward the topic of noise cancellation.

Our testers felt the program was useful for masking unwanted conversations, and less distracting than listening to pop music. If you're interested, give the demo a try. We welcome your feedback.

Earl Vickers
The Sound Guy, Inc.
http://chatterblocker.com

Unwanted information

You know, this might actually help (at least to some degree). My wife and I went and saw Notting Hill (guess which one of us got to pick the movie that day) at the theater. I don't know why (we were the only ones in the whole theater) but they had subtitles turned on (English movie with English subtitles - obviously for hearing-impaired). For the next 90 minutes it took all my willpower to keep my eyes from shooting to the bottom of the screen and reading those blasted subtitles. It was really strange. My wife mentioned it too - she couldn't keep herself from reading them.

Speech is very much the same thing. If we can hear conversations, even just partial bits here and there, our brains will immediately work at translating the speech into thought.

So on one hand, I can understand how simply covering those frequencies with sounds that don't sound like speech could alleviate some distraction (assuming the sound it admits isn't blatantly annoying). During that movie if the subtitled text was replaced by white noise / static, I at least wouldn't have been trying to make sense of the extraneous information.

Dan East

simple

if it is, what i think it is, all it needs to do is record the speach with a microphone, flip the waveform, and play that back through the speakers, which would cancel out the wave created by the speach its self. this would rely on very low latency soundcards, so it can process the audio in time to playback the canceling wave, so the person hears nothing, rather than some horrible screaching sounds

Glorified audio player?

So /. points me to a $40 piece of software that is a glorified audio player? It doesn't generate white noise (or pseudo white noise), it doesn't cancel sound... it just plays audio tracks.

I hope at least somebody at /. is getting a kickback for advertising this product.

my tried and tested solution

iTunes and headphones

Take a close look

Take a close look at the website and then have a good guess whether or not this might be useful. In my opinion, background music will do a much better job at relaxing you if you chose the right music.
While I was looking around at the website, I found another "wonderful" product, that finally made it clear to me what kind of products this company tries to sell. Look at their intellectual property page at <URL:http://www.sfxmachine.com/misc/ip.html> and find out about the ingenious "Purr Detector Cat Collar".

My solution ...

"White noise", by Carl Friedrich Gauss. Best music ever!

Free version at this link

http://www.nch.com.au/ams/index.html [nch.com.au]

A couple of better ideas

Other solutions that actually work, but not exactly the issue?: If dealing with youths, and you are 'older', use a high frequency generating buzz(As we age, our ability to hear these higher frequencies diminishes). Numerous studies have found very effective. I beleive that cell hardware manufacturers are startuing to use these frequencies so they can tailor to the younger customers. And then there is the slice and dice method. This device, which I cant yet find link to, "encyrpts" your voice. Apparently it rebroadcasts what you say (e.g. in to the phone) with a slight delay. That basically makes what you are telling the person on the other end of the phone unintelligible to everyone nearby you. I would guess that unintelligible might become "white noise". I wonder if one were to mic' the poeple standing nearby and rebroadcast their conversation with a delay (e.g. via PC speaker) back towards them (call this "crypto-talk"), would they be unable to understand each other? That could be an incentive for them to move farther away (where the effect of the speakers would diminish). And it might not be too detectable - when they stop talking, the crypto-talk stops also. Any audio engineers want to postulate on this? I really need to find the link....

Rip off

Just tried the demo version of ChatterBlocker. From reading the description on their site, I imagined this to be some sort of active sound cancellation software. It's not. No microphone is required. It just loops through pre-recorded sound samples. The effect is more annoying than any office chatter.

The Whispering Box Mystery

This reminds me of a Rick Brant [wikipedia.org] book, The Whispering Box Mystery [fantasticfiction.co.uk] by John Blaine. It is probably 15-20 years since I read the book, but the plot is like the following:

Someone invents a device to emit a high frequency sound that paralyzes people (the balance organs are located in the ears) and uses this for robbery. Rick becomes involved and manages eventually to create another device that produces a counter sound to neutralize the paralyzing device.

Of course this is fiction (and interference was not accounted for at all in the book as far as I remember), but never the less it was an interesting concept.

Develop Selective hearing.

That is what I did but it was just a knack I unconsciously developed over time to make up for a severe hearing loss. I learned to give all my attention to one voice or sound at a time. This does cause problems because people often think you are ignoring them or that you are just a jerk.

Now, a hearing aid in my left ear brings its 95% hearing loss to about 70% and I have a 60% loss in my right ear. I still rely on my selective hearing in bad acoustics or where there is ambient noise, though the chip in my hearing aid has modest noise canceling technology.

I just use my cone of silence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Silence [wikipedia.org]

free alternative

http://www.luketan.com/songs/audio/WhiteNoise.mp3 [luketan.com]

This is where it starts...

First, we block out distracting speech

Then, we block out political speech

Then, we block out negative political speech

Finally, the government makes them mandatory

Lo and behold, no free speech.

The Silence of Interstellar Space

For when I really need to concentrate:

          MAX(c) polyurethane foam earplugs (NRR 33)
      + Elvex UltraSonic HB-650 tactical hearing protectors (NRR 29)

http://earplugstore.stores.yahoo.net/holemaxuffop. html [yahoo.net]
http://www.elvex.com/tactical-hearing-protection-e armuffs.htm [elvex.com]

Demo works fine on my Sennheiser PXC 300s

Then again most everyone else have just left the office so a bit hard to judge. It really does seem block out any office sound though, even when played at low volume.
This program combined with the PXC 300s might be overkill but I'm tempted to buy it nevertheless.
http://www.di.fm/ [www.di.fm] does also work very well with the 300s.

I too find that a noisy work environment is bad for my concentration as a programmer.
[Now, what am I doing here on /. ... ;) ]

Re:Er,,,

Except, noise cancellin headphones work best for loud background noise like fans, airplane engine noise, etc rather than staccato office voices like my nearby co-worker. (I have the Bose Quietcomfort pair.) From personal experience with the Bose headphones and this chatty co-worker, the headphones cut a bit of her voice but in some ways you can hear her even clearly since all the office white noise is removed. To completely get rid of her voice, I need to combine the noise canceling with music in the background. Then she disappears!

Re:Er,,,

You're an idiot and so is the mod who called you "Insightful". Read your own link:

They work well for sounds that are continuous, such as the hum of a refrigerator, but are rather ineffective against speech or other rapidly changing audio signals.

Noise cancellation requires hardware. Headphones use microphones to pick up the sounds which are then cancelled by phase-inversion [headwize.com]. It gets vastly more complex when dealing with open spaces. This is nothing that software alone has a solution for.

Re:My Solution

You might want to try a pair of good in-ear plugs, like Etymotic [etymotic.com].

RTFA

Does ChatterBlocker use noise cancellation?

        No. Noise cancellation would not be effective over speakers, and noise cancelling headphones have limited effectiveness in silencing voice.

        Good quality noise cancelling headphones are great for reducing low-frequency sounds, such as airplane engine rumble, but they are not as effective in the 2 to 8 kHz consonant range that conveys much of the speech intelligibility.

        How does ChatterBlocker work?

                ChatterBlocker masks unwanted office chatter using a soothing blend of nature sounds, music and anti-chatter voices.

                It also offers mindfulness meditation tracks intended to increase concentration, reduce distractibility and minimize the stress response to office noise.

So i guess the way it works is by making sounds that blend with other background noises, but aren't as annoying (in theory).

Some people having auditory issues

Specifically, central auditory processing deficits that prevent them from hearing more than one conversation at a time. Hearing the clutter from several competing, but incomprehensible conversations can be distracting.