THE ACTIVE CONTROL OF SOUND

Active control of sound results from destructive interference between the sound field of an original acoustic source and that from a controllable array of 'secondary' acoustic sources. For this destructive interference to occur over an appreciable region of space the sound field of the secondary sources must match that from the primary source in both time and space. The spatial matching requirement leads to an upper frequency of applicability of active control. Active control complements conventional passive methods of sound control, which do not work well at low frequencies. Practical feedforward controllers, using a multichannel generalisation of the well known LMS adaptive algorithm, have been developed, using as many as 16 loudspeakers and 32 microphones, and applied with considerable success in the control of low-frequency propeller noise inside aircraft and low-frequency engine noise inside cars.