The Anti-Acoustic Helmet

One of my pet peeves about visiting home (and living at home, period) is that whenever my father is in a negative mood, he forces his negativity upon everyone else. Sort of like a self-preservational tactic by which he rids himself of his own negative energy, an ends (emotional peace) which justify the means for him (instilling emotional turmoil in others). 8:30am, and he's at it: all my mom asked was, "Why did you put those CDs there?" He'd relocated them from somewhere they'd been stored for 10 years to a new place in the same room. Her question was neither negative nor positive: it was neutrally curious. Her "why?" was a genuine request for information, nothing more. Yet my father, emotionally vulnerable imho, interpreted that as a personal attack -- on his intelligence, on his motives, on his authority, on all manner of things -- and for the last 25 minutes he's been expressing this quite brusquely to "us." I use the term loosely for reasons that will soon become clear.

I was sitting at the computer when this happened; having nothing to do with it, and wanting no part in it (despite his clear invitation, via his accusative plural of "you guys"), I firmly plugged my fingers in my ears and re-read my previous blog entry (having just completed it) a good two solid times before I got bored. And during this time, I realized something:

You can never* build perfectly sound-blocking headphones. Let's go ahead and defend that *'ed term. Here's what I think it would take to build perfectly sound-blocking headphones:
(1) they would need to either block airwaves from entering the ear -or- they would need to produce an inverse and dynamic sound-wave which would cancel out any sound waves that would have otherwise entered the external auditory canal.

(2) they would need to either shield the head from airwaves -or- they would need to physically vibrate (like an electric massager) in a manner that is both dynamic and inverse to the sound waves that bombard one's cheeks, scalp, etc.

(3) same as #2 but for the body; solution would be a more intelligent vibrating apparatus for the head alone.

The reason for this is because we ultimately hear thanks to vibrating bones, not thanks to sound waves entering the external ear canal (although that route does indeed consist of the majority of normally-heard sound). While #3 is neglible, #2 is not: headphones can fix #1, but conventional headphones cannot fix #2.

What you need to fix #1, #2, and #3 is one of the following:
(a) an anti-acoustic helmet, or
(b) a soundproof chamber

Letter A would need to gently vibrate in a manner which cancelled out sounds that normally resonate one's head's sinuses and produce sound. When I say "gently," I do mean gently: you do not normally feel your cheeks vibrating when somebody speaks, so you should not feel them vibrate from this helmet, either.

Letter B, certainly, is the more practical of the two in certain respects -- ease of design, for one thing -- but its Achilles' heel is that it isn't portable. You cannot take the chamber with you: no, you must enter the chamber, and once you exit, you return to the real world -- a world often filled with unwanted sounds.

There is, I suppose, a third option:
(c) counsel people to not share their negative energy with others, and (if they must) to express their hurt and negativity to someone trained and willing to listen

But if the negative party isn't ready for Letter C, then there's not much else we can do save turn to Letters A and B.