this is electronics attached to your ankle or constructed into you shoe

its basic function is it cancles out loud shoe noise or squeaks

a secondary function is it could replace excessive foot noise with sound effects of your choosing
-- vfrackis, Aug 28 2009

Teachers would like the second idea. The heavy boots of doom.
-- ldischler, Aug 28 2009


Noise canceling, where you play a sound wave that adds to the existing sound wave to cancel it out, depends on the position of the listener - unless you exactly match the source of the noise. So, you can do that for one ear of one person in the room, but not for everybody.

The second half of the invention, shoes that make sound effects, has already been posted at least twice - see the other ideas in the Fashion: Shoe: Audio category.
-- jutta, Aug 28 2009


if the noise canceling mechanism is located close to the source of the noise generation it is easier to cancel and you can have success damping the noise for more than on individual at a time.

Not to mention the fact that as long as it works from the shoe wearers perspective mission accomplished.

how about the Brazilian roomba awfully similar to the hair mazer?

and I thought that this was the "half" bakery

POST IT NOTE !!!!!!!!!! glue already exists, paper already exists suppose you would mark that for deletion too

someone posts an idea for for custard filled breast implants and they get buns

what do i get? intense scrutiny and pressure to follow the letter of the laws that you established from every direction. oppressive, despotic abuse of authority
-- vfrackis, Aug 28 2009


thanks for the bun UB and for understanding

btw i like the custard implant idea too i am concerned the filling would need preservatives
-- vfrackis, Aug 28 2009


//Noise canceling.... depends on the position of the listener.//

Depends. Or at least it should.

If you have noise coming from many sources, then a noise canceller will only work for one listener (one position) - it detects the sum of incoming noises and creates an anti- wave; but a listener elsewhere will be hearing the noises at a different time, and hence needs a different noise- canceller.

BUT if you have noise originating from a single source, it should be possible to cancel it from a point close to that source (close compared to the wavelength of the sound) for all listeners.

Imagine a stone dropped into a pond, creating a series of concentric ripples. If you dropped another stone into the pond very close to the first one and at just the right time, you would create an opposing set of ripples which would cancel out the first ones at source, and nothing would spread. The cancelling won't be perfect, since the first and second stones aren't in exactly the same spot, but it could be pretty good.

Sound at (say) 1kHz has a wavelength of about 30cm, so your antinoise generator would need to be only a very few cm (a fraction of a wavelength) away from the noise- making part of the shoe in order to be effective. Higher frequencies (shorter wavelengths) would be harder to cancel effectively.

In conclusion, you can cancel all of the noise for one of the people, and you can cancel one of the noises for all of the people, but you can't cancel all of the noises for all of the people.

[EDIT - bugger. I just realized that vfrakis pointed this point out pointedly in a point he made earlier.]
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Aug 29 2009



random, halfbakery