Excessive amounts of acoustic noise pose a health risk to a majority of the population and this is the most signicant single cause of hearing loss in Australia. In addition, there are many situations where acoustic noises are annoying or at least undesirable, such as automobile cabin noise, babble noise in a restaurant, noise inside an airplane, or noise from machinery and industry plants. Thus, for a long time, there has been a strong demand for finding ways of eliminating acoustic noises to improve our lives.

This project aims to develop new theory and technologies for acoustic quiet zone generation in broadband diffusive sound fields, that is, to cancel undesirable noise or acoustic interference over a volumetric region in open or enclosed spaces, using active sound control techniques. It will provide novel signal processing theory for further development of active noise cancellation techniques over spatial regions. New technologies developed from this project are expected to underpin the future development of acoustic signal processing research and will have a broad range of applications such as reduction of noise inside cars, creation of individual quiet zones in passenger planes and mitigation of acoustic noise made by industrial plants to neighboring suburbs. The outcomes from this proposal will also have economic importance as it can reduce the health risk posed to people working or living in noisy environments.