Let me preface this all with: I’m not an expert, and this is based on my intuition and understanding of noise cancellation technology and how sound works. I’m a

Let me preface this all with: I’m not an expert, and this is based on my intuition and understanding of noise cancellation technology and how sound works. I’m an idiot, take this with a grain of salt. I dont think this is really possible, but probably not for the reason you think. Noise cancellation works by picking up surrounding sounds using microphones and then generating the same sounds 180 degrees out of phase. So, we could get rid of the microphones processing sounds in real-time and instead we use something that can identify the song (like Shazam) as well as the position in the song, and then use reference audio for that song to play it back out of phase. So sure, that seems at least possible. But the audio file itself _doesn’t describe exactly what you hear_. The acoustics of the room, your position in the room, the speakers, the amplifier, and I’m sure many other things all color and change what you’re hearing. In short, I’m not so sure that raw audio data out of phase _actually_ matches what you’re hearing in all situations. You’d still want a microphone.