“We are living in a very noisy world. From the hum of traffic outside your window to the next-door neighbor’s blaring TV to sounds from a co-worker’s cubicle, unwanted noise remains a resounding problem.

To cut through the din, an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers from MIT and elsewhere developed a sound-suppressing silk fabric that could be used to create quiet spaces.

The fabric, which is barely thicker than a human hair, contains a special fiber that vibrates when a voltage is applied to it. The researchers leveraged those vibrations to suppress sound in two different ways.

In one, the vibrating fabric generates sound waves that interfere with an unwanted noise to cancel it out, similar to noise-canceling headphones, which work well in a small space like your ears but do not work in large enclosures like rooms or planes.

In the other, more surprising technique, the fabric is held still to suppress vibrations that are key to the transmission of sound. This prevents noise from being transmitted through the fabric and quiets the volume beyond. This second approach allows for noise reduction in much larger spaces like rooms or cars.”

From MIT News.