Pedestrians wearing noise-cancelling headphones are a curse on many bike trails, waltzing carelessly into the path of riders, completely oblivious to your presence.
The person on foot has blocked out the world because their headphones use active noise-cancellation (ANC), which generates a signal that closely matches the exterior noise and cancels it out.
Now, thanks to a new invention, we riders can ring a bike bell that cancels out the algorithm that is trying to cancel us out.
Car company Skoda, in conjunction with the University of Salford, has developed a bike bell tone that can penetrate ANC systems and alert inattentive wakers and runners to the presence of people on bikes.
The researchers discovered that a mechanical bell using pure analogue-generated sound could outsmart the ANC algorithm.
A certain, dual-pitch sound in a narrow frequency range proves too complex for the ANC to process at the speed required to silence it.
Measurements conducted during testing of the DuoBell demonstrated that pedestrians wearing active noise-cancelling headphones had up to 22 metres of additional reaction distance when DuoBell was activated, representing a crucial safety margin.
Real-world trials conducted on the streets of London in February with food delivery riders conformed the effectiveness of the bell in real world conditions.
The bell is not yet available in the marketplace, but Skoda has made the research freely available.
Of course, there is an alternative universe where noise-cancelling headphones can be designed to listen for a bell and let the sound through, much like some Apple headphones use AI to let an external human voice through when music is playing.
Rather than fight the algorithm, we could collaborate with it.
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