Inside the Audio Lab: How Apple developed the world’s first end‑to‑end hearing health experience
Apple’s state-of-the-art Audio Lab in Cupertino, California, supports the innovative work of its acoustic engineers. They use the lab to conduct user studies in various listening rooms and test new features in its anechoic chambers, which completely absorb reflective sounds and isolate external noise.
The Audio Lab is the hub for the design, measurement, tuning, and validation of all of Apple’s products with speakers or microphones. It’s also the center for Apple’s multiyear, cross-team collaboration to build the groundbreaking new hearing health features on AirPods Pro 2. Available today as a free software update,1 the end-to-end experience helps minimize exposure to loud environmental noise with Hearing Protection, track hearing with an at-home Hearing Test, and receive assistance for perceived mild to moderate hearing loss using AirPods Pro as a clinical-grade Hearing Aid.
According to the World Health Organization, approximately 1.5 billion people around the world are living with hearing loss. “Hearing loss affects individuals in every region and country, yet often goes unrecognized. Hearing is a core component of communication for so many and is an important factor for health and wellbeing,” says Shelly Chadha, M.D., the World Health Organization’s technical lead for hearing. “Technology can play an important role in raising awareness and providing intervention options for those affected by hearing loss.”
“Every person’s hearing is different, so we created an innovative, end-to-end hearing health experience that addresses this variability in a way that’s both simple to use and adaptable to a wide range of needs. That’s especially important because hearing loss affects people of all ages with different levels of tech savviness,” says Sumbul Desai, M.D., Apple’s vice president of Health. “With the Hearing Aid feature, we wanted to build something so intuitive, it felt like an extension of your senses. We knew the results would literally change people’s lives — and democratize access to treatment for a condition that affects more than a billion people.”
Engineers used highly specialized spaces across the Audio Lab to help make these breakthrough features possible.
“From the quietest sounds we can hear for the Hearing Test feature, to speech in noisy restaurants for the Hearing Aid feature, and even concert levels for Hearing Protection, we can bring the real world into our acoustics facilities with playback of calibrated soundscapes from all over the world, or take accurate acoustic measurements at the touch of a button,” says Kuba Mazur, Apple’s hearing health lead engineer within Acoustics Engineering.
The Longwave anechoic chamber was built on a separate foundation that uses springs to isolate it from the rest of the lab, allowing for accurate sound measurements without any noise or vibration disturbances. The chamber includes a custom-built loudspeaker and microphone arc that can measure head-related transfer functions, or in other words, how sound interacts with the human body. Having both the loudspeaker and microphone arrays within this chamber makes it a unique space with many applications, including AirPods, iPhone, and HomePod development.
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