Destructive interference happens when a compression and rarefaction section meet and the next effect is that there’s no push or pull on the particles. The waves don’t destroy each other (as the name implies), but rather they cancel out the effect of each other when they interact with each other, which results in no sound at all. Which is kind of odd to think about: two sound waves interacting to make no sound at all. This happens at the nodes, where there’s no particle displacement.

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Concert halls, auditoriums, and large areas where sound is a big issue have to be specially designed to minimize the destructive interference. Destructive interference is really useful to pilots and construction workers who have to use headphones since their job is so noisy. The headphones generate a pulse that is out of phase to the background noise.

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