Make any headset noise cancelling with only software

[lpsarsam]

Hi guys
I was wondering, if you had a headset that doesn't have active noise cancelling, could you make them noise cancelling by taking any input from the chat microphone on the headset, sending that to a computer program which generates the opposite of that sound wave (to use destructive interference to reduce the noise), and then plays that back to the headphones, all in real-time.
Do you think this is possible, or are there electronic or processing speed limitations to doing this.
From what I know, proper noise cancelling headphones do this but have dedicated microphones and circuitry.
If this is possible, do you know any software to do this that I could experiment with?

Thanks

 

[Raven Luni]

Its a complicated subject. Technically it is possible but you'd be getting into some heavy DSP. It's not simply a matter of inverting the wave sampled from the mic, you have to account for everything that happens to sound that reaches that travels from that point to each ear, and from each ear to that point, and all the transformations it goes through on the way (your head will have some filtering action).

The nearer the sampling point is to the ear the better and you really need 2. In theory you could use a set of control sounds and calculate the convolution but setting up the sampling itself is a pretty complicated task. Really, its pretty impossible to get perfect results.

 

[lpsarsam]

Ok, thanks