Sona: Real-Time Multi-Target Sound Attenuation for Noise Sensitivity

For people with noise sensitivity, everyday soundscapes can be overwhelming. Existing noise-management tools, such as active noise cancellation, typically apply broad suppression across the entire environment, easing discomfort at the expense of situational awareness and participation. We present Sona, a system that reframes acoustic accessibility as selective, user-steerable soundscape mediation, attenuating triggering sounds while preserving other ambient sounds users may want to hear. Sona combines real-time acoustic context sensing to reduce interaction effort during moments of overload, steerable suppression that supports continuous negotiation between comfort and environmental awareness, and end-user personalization that extends filtering beyond fixed sound taxonomies using short recordings from users’ own environments. We describe Sona’s prototype implementation and derive design implications for supporting customizable, context-aware soundscape mediation for people with noise sensitivity.

CHI EA 26: Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems