The roar of battle
How often do you find yourself immersed in such a cacophony of noise that it’s impossible to hear what someone is trying to say to you? In the busy, modern world, it’s an increasingly common experience
How often do you find yourself immersed in such a cacophony of noise that it's impossible to hear what someone is trying to say to you? In the busy, modern world, it's an increasingly common experience
What might just be a nuisance in some situations can become a matter of life and death in others.
A soldier pinned down in a fire-fight, for example, needs to hear what his commander is saying.
In the 1990s the Norwegian and Swedish military part-funded the development of a hearing device that can screen out background noise, rendering speech clearer; the US Marines have used the resulting technology since 2006. Now it is becoming commercially available.
The QuietPro is an earplug with a built-in computer that allows speech to pass but shuts out unwanted noise. It comprises a miniature loudspeaker and both internal and external microphones.
The inner microphone measures the noise in the ear; the earplug shuts out the noise but allows speech to pass, thanks to an onboard microchip.
In quiet surroundings the sounds that you want to hear are allowed through, but when things get noisy the system puts up a barrier, allowing only speech to pass.
Because the earpiece lets every noise through in a quite environment, users never feel acoustically “shut off” from their surroundings.
That means they can hold a normal conversation and are in tune with whatever is going on around them.
With a radio built in, the system is a complete communications terminal for use in noisy environments.
The earpiece can be used to send out messages too. It can pick up the wearer’s voice from inside their ear canal, where there is virtually no background noise, and transmit it to colleagues – neither a hand-held microphone or microphone clip in front of the mouth are required.
The company that now owns the QuietPro technology, Nacre, has developed the first civilian version of the earpiece, for use on offshore oil platforms. But it sees other beneficial uses on factory production lines, in machine rooms or with police officers and fire-fighters.
Hearing a little voice whispering in your ear used to be an indication of madness; but it could become just an everyday sound.
