Help with background noise

[mehs]

So I play ttrpg with my friend over discord, except there is a problem in that he has a younger brother who is on the lower functioning end of the autism spectrum and will usually create very loud noises in the background that bleed through the voice chat. Adding on to this is that the friend is the gm so listening to him is rather important.

The current thing that I am attempting is that I got him a literal mini sound booth to hopefully deafen the background noise. Also understand that there was escalation previously to this, with playing at a time when the brother is most likely to be asleep, trying to use press to talk, and obviously being in a different room.

What are suggestions for other ways to deafen loud background noises that are being picked up by discord and transmitted?

[GentlemanVoodoo]

You may need to have a frank discussion with your GM/friend about his little brother's outburst. Do other players in your group feel the same way as you do? More so have you considered that your GM/friend might not have options to reduce the noise of his family member within their control? I know not what their living situation is but that is one option you may have to consider and in the end deal with the outburst.

[Cespenar]

There was a nvidia RTX sound cancelling tech that I remember seeing in the last year. I remember it basically negating a vacuum cleaner's sound just an arm's length away. Might be worth investigating.

To note, though, I have no idea if it works with other human voices or it's even affordable. Just a tidbit I remembered.

[AdmiralCheez]

Does your friend have a headset with a microphone? A lot of headset mics aren't sensitive enough to pick up background noises, or will at least dampen them quite a bit. You could also try getting a standalone microphone with a very narrow pickup pattern, so that you have to be close to it in order to hear anything.

[Man_Over_Game]

Discord has a feature that allows a user to block out background noise and to only receive input when something at a minimum threshold is picked up.

Obviously, this doesn't work if the background noise is louder than the user's own voice, but it works perfectly fine for blocking out a TV or something.

Discord, by default, tries to guess where this threshold is, but you can manually choose where that threshold should be. It's something he'd have to set up on his end, under the audio/device settings in Discord.

[veti]

Does your friend have a headset with a microphone? A lot of headset mics aren't sensitive enough to pick up background noises, or will at least dampen them quite a bit. You could also try getting a standalone microphone with a very narrow pickup pattern, so that you have to be close to it in order to hear anything.

If the mic is held very close to the speaker's lips - which is what a headset generally does - then it becomes possible to mask out even quite loud background. You can get a noise cancelling mic specifically designed for this sort of scenario, but it needs to be held very close to the mouth.

[agustin1987]

I have great success with a Plantronics Voyager headset mic. It does such a good job of filtering out background noise that most of the time, the other caller(s) can’t hear any of the background noise, whether that be people talking in the background, trucks driving by, taps running, etc. You should try this. It will work perfect in your case.

I recently bought the Jabra Elite 65t and while the sound is better, both for me and on the mic, it doesn’t do nearly as good a job on microphone noise cancellation.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

This is the point where I'd normally start with the joke suggestions like tying the source of the noise up in a tree outside, but honestly OP and his DM seem very mature and solution minded about this, and such joking just seems misplaced here. Good for you, keep doing that.

I can only second the suggestion of a headset. I have some pretty weird experiences with headset mics, I have several old abused headsets here of which the speakers are mostly fine if you jiggle the wires a bit but the mics seem busted (it's kind of hard to jiggle right with no direct feedback after all), but if you have a working headset that should be an improvement. Unless you're already using one of course...