Until the sounds of traffic, lawn mowers, or the neighbor’s barking dog start to seep in as well.

 

Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks it’s silly that outdoor air and a quiet house are mutually exclusive. A team of South Korean engineers are using acoustic metamaterials to create a window that reduce environmental noise while still allowing air to pass through into the house.

 

The study, published recently in arXiv, proposes a window consisting of “a three-dimensional array of strong diffraction-type resonators with many holes centered at each individual resonator.” According to the authors, the unique design of the window, which is based on two wave theories of diffraction and acoustic metamaterials, is capable of filtering out unwanted noises while still allowing the free pass-through of air.