Ten questions concerning active noise control in the built environment

TLDR

Urban noise pollution poses a significant public health threat, yet passive controls are limited and bulky, while active noise control—though historically established and popular in headphones—remains uncommon in built environments despite its demonstrated benefits in automotive and emerging window applications. The paper poses ten questions to clarify ANC principles and identify opportunities for active mitigation in environmental settings, including emerging intelligent ANC for variable noise scenarios enabled by low‑power electronics, speaker advances, and AI‑driven DSP. The authors address operational concerns arising from multi‑stakeholder implementation of ANC in built environments. ANC has been demonstrated at source in construction machinery and in transmission via noise barriers, yet key research gaps remain that must be addressed to promote wider adoption in built environments.

Abstract

Urban noise pollution is an omnipresent but often neglected threat to public health that must be addressed urgently. Passive noise control measures, which are less effective at reducing low-frequency noise and are often bulky and may impede airflow. As evidenced in automobiles, active control of cabin noise has resulted in lighter cars due to reduced passive insulation. Despite its long history and recent popularisation by consumer headphones, the implementation of active noise control in the built environment is still rare. To date, active noise control (ANC) has been demonstrated, at source, in construction machines and, in the transmission path, in noise barriers. Recent demand for naturally-ventilated buildings has also spurred the development of active control solutions at the receiving end, such as on windows. The ten questions aim to demystify the principles of ANC and highlight areas in which environmental noise can be actively mitigated. Since the implementation of active control in the built environment usually involves multiple stakeholders, operational concerns are addressed. To conclude, research gaps are identified that would enable increased adoption of ANC in the built environment. There is also renewed interest in applying intelligent ANC to tackle environmentally complex applications, such as varying noise levels in the earcup of ANC headphones, particularly with the advent of the low-cost, low-power, highly-efficient embedded electronics; advancing speaker technology; and new impetus from digital signal processing and artificial intelligence Algorithms.