A team of scientists in singapore has even invented what's being called noise cancelling headphones for your apartment. It's an array of speakers that emit sound waves calculated to cancel out the incoming noise. So the appetite to mitigate the noise of modern civilization is plainly strong. As for the exact cost of all that noise? That is what josh dean wanted to figure out. He set up a study with two main experiments. The first experiment was designed to answer this question of, what is the impact of noise on productivity? To do so, i recruit a group of manual laborers who are used to working in noisy factory conditions and bring them to a textile training facility. And then while they are