Noisy family? Loud construction right outside your window? A new flexible loudspeaker could help you rest easily. It could turn your walls into noise-canceling systems.
The new loudspeaker is about as thick as a few sheets of paper. It's lightweight and flexible enough to stick to most surfaces to control noise much easier, notes Jinchi Han, an electrical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
Lots of dome-shaped（圆顶状的）microstructures are in the centre of the new speaker. Han's team sandwiches their new material between two plastic sheets to protect the domes. "The bottom layer lifts up the small domes so that they can vibrate（震动）freely, and the upper protective layer is thicker than the domes that are secured in the middle of the layers, " he explains. "So if you touch the surface, you don't need to worry about damaging these small structures. "
Han points out large area of the new material could make controlling noise much easier.
Each dome works as a tiny speaker. The domes can generate sound waves all together, in groups or individually. Wallpapering your bedroom with this material would create speakers all around you. Those same speakers could then dampen or cancel unwanted sound. "If you desire, you could turn any space into a quiet zone where you could sleep or study with barely any noise, " Han says. He also sees applications in cars, airplanes, apartments or wherever unwanted noise is a problem.
Large versions could be the next step for this super-thin speakers, says Lori Beckstead, a sound artist.
"The new speakers are so thin and light that they could be placed in spaces where traditional loudspeakers might have been impractical, " Beckstead adds. She notes that adding noise-canceling technology to loud spaces from restaurants to noisy industrial plants would be fantastic.
