Marques

In London, a city with 1.5 million bike commuters per day,

a city where 54% of all headphones sold have active noise canceling and has also seen a 24% rise in cyclist pedestrian collisions.

They decided that they needed to work on this new bell because while there are obviously so many variables between pedestrians, cyclists, automobiles and everything, they believe that the mix of smartphone usage and active noise canceling is being detrimental to situational awareness and recognizing alert sounds.

So what they decided they had to do was

find a way to make bells on your bike noticeable by somebody wearing noise-canceling headphones.

So there's this big study.

We'll link it in the show notes.

Ellis could potentially help me explain this better.

But they essentially tested the top six most popular headphones with active noise-canceling to try and find a frequency that... Ellis, is this the easiest way of describing it?

Active noise-canceling essentially looks at the frequencies that are coming in and then...

plays the reverse version of it to cancel out the noise.

So they found that 750 hertz was a frequency that, for whatever reason, ANC just wasn't really able to handle in terms of blocking out.

isn't it like a super like a bass it is so so the reason this is this is called the skoda duo bell is because the 750 hertz can break uh noise cancellation but that is a very low noise for people who are not wearing noise canceling headphones so that bell just by itself at 750 hertz probably won't actually alert somebody in an environment that's not wearing the headphones

So that's why the bell has two different frequencies on it.

One is over 2000 Hertz because that is still a general like bike bell alert sound that people are used to.

So people who aren't wearing headphones, it would be crazy to do this whole thing to help people with headphones and then make it worse and not alerting people who aren't wearing the headphones.

I would assume it's something different you're not used to.

You're wondering what that sound is.

Maybe.

The way they tested it is through this kind of complicated way.