Something a little more fancy. I got a set of Bose QC-II's as a gift, and I actually like them pretty well. Never having tried anything like that, I was a little annoyed at first they have to have a battery and be turned on to work. Silly me. Anyhow, the idea is they have a microphone on the outside that gets blended with the regular signal, only inverted, so that the external noise gets canceled at your ear. No music is needed to try this out. Just put them on and turn them on. In a second or so, the regular background noise seems to disappear. The not so regular noise doesn't get reduced in the same way, but overall the effect is nice.