There can be many sources of stress in our lives, and one of the more unavoidable ones sometimes comes from our neighbors. Those living in apartment complexes have had the unfortunate experience of having to bear with rowdy children, rumbling washing machines, and other sources of noise coming from units above them without any recourse. Unfortunately, we cant always cover our ears either, as that brings up a whole different set of problems of their own.Were often treated to futuristic or magical solutions that can seemingly mute undesirable sounds at will, but we actually do have some of that technology available today. With a little imagination and forward-thinking design, the active noise cancellation technologies used in headphones and microphones could potentially be employed to also cancel out the noise in our homes, as this bat-shaped device concept tries to demonstrate.Designer: blender KIMBats are quite known for their use of sound and echo to navigate their way through a dark world, which seems to be a fitting motif for a speaker whose function is to actually echo sound rather than simply produce it. In its inactive state, the batty speaker looks like a bat hanging from the ceiling of a cave, its wings wrapped around its body and its digital eyes closed like slits. With a warm, muted color scheme, theyre supposed to blend well with most interior motifs and look a little less distracting.Whether or not youll find it disturbing to have these cylindrical objects hanging from your ceiling is a different question entirely, but they do make for a curious sight. Thats especially true when its lower body tilts down, making it look like a bat in mid-flight.Of course, a visually striking speaker wont simply make the noise go away, and the batty concept design proposes the use of a special kind of ANC or active noise cancellation to pull off that feat. In essence, it would detect and analyze impact sound and airborne sound transmitted from the unit above through the slab of your ceiling and emit opposing phase waves in the direction of the noise, effectively canceling out the sound.This is practically the same principle used in ANC in general, so it definitely has some scientific basis. The slight difference is that it also listens for the sounds produced by impacts such as heavy footsteps and machine vibrations, the most common sources of annoyance in these situations. In cases where batty speakers are too far apart, an auxiliary sensor can be installed in between them, acting like a cave stalagmite that assists bats in echolocation. Whether such a concept will actually be effective is something that only experimentation can truly tell.The post Bat-shaped speaker concept reduces noise to keep you from going batty first appeared on Yanko Design.