Sono sticks to a window and replaces noise pollution with pleasant sounds

Who doesn’t like the pleasant environmental sounds like chirping of birds, rustling of tree leaves, ocean waves etc. But, the noise pollution which is one of the major environmental issues of today, tends to hinder these pleasing sounds.  This noise pollution from the street including car alarms, construction sites’ horns, traffic noise and all also invades the peace of your home. Although there are insulated windows that cut off the outer noise to enter your home, but these also eliminate those enjoyable natural sounds. Austria based industrial designer Rudolf Stefanich has created a high end window gadget dubbed as Sono that allows the user to manually adjust the outdoor volume and select the  sound that should enter in.

Sono can be easily stuck to the window that eliminates or cancel certain noises that passes through. The concept of this window device is quite similar to the noise-cancelling headphones. The surrounding sounds are detected by the gadget, which actively emits a counter-signal to take the place of the noise either with a projected silence or with a pleasant sound like twittering of birds. The gadget is powered by a combination of grid electricity and the harvested energy of electromagnetic noise and similar WI-Fi signals.

The pebble shaped device is about the size of an outdated thermostat dial and works by detecting the vibrations of sound that strikes on the glass window. The user can turn the Sono dial to replace the unpleasant and unwanted sounds with silence or a much more pleasant sound like that of an ocean wave. The Sono is a concept device that is shortlisted as a top-20 finalist for the 2013 James Dyson Awards. Check out the demo of the concept design in the video below: