Last week I spent four days at an enormous music festival in central New York, sleeping in a trailer and grateful – but deafened – for the generator that kept our 80s-vintage trailer cool in 85-degree heat and dripping humidity. The week before that, on the opposite side of the country in the cool of Northern California, I was tucked in a canvas tent in a hip family-friendly new glamping resort on the Russian River surrounded by the shrieking of happy free-running children. And in between, we hosted visiting family, packing five people and three dogs into our 1200-square-foot cottage. Then there were the four flights, all in the company of vacationing families porting babies and toddlers very unhappy to be there. What do all these travel experiences have in common? Answer: bone-rattling, eardrum-vibrating noise and a desperate wish for silence and sleep. The timing couldn’t have been better, though, as I’d just received a set of QuietOn noise-canceling earplugs to test out.

And sure enough, these high-tech earplugs proved the saving grace. Here’s a QuietOnreview video I made about my experience trying out the QuietOn earplugs through all of the above adventures.

Developed in Finland, QuietOn earplugs work by employing tiny microphones to pick up specific sounds with the potential to disturb you and create opposite sound waves to cancel them out. Known as active noise canceling (ANC,) this technology reacts to noise at any frequency, from the low rumble of snoring or traffic to the screeches of early morning birds and cancels them out. They don’t create total silence – the company makes clear that no device can – but they certainly muted the barking of three dogs, late-night music in the festival campground, and most importantly, screaming babies two rows away in a small plane.

They are a little tricky to get the hang of – you have to get the QuietOn earplugs into position within 15 seconds for the technology to go into full effect – but once you do, they’re impressively effective.

The verdict: They work so well that I slept through alarms on two separate occasions and had to learn to put my phone on vibrate under my pillow when I had an early rising.