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I think my point is being missed.
Imagine illustrating noise cancelling by adding two identical but opposite soundwaves.
Source: https://www.soundguys.com/how-noise-cancelling-headphones-work-12380/
Noise cancellation relies on precisely controlling the distances to listener. If OP were to simply set up a tone generator near the hard drive, the waves would alternately constructively and destructively interfere as OP walked around the room.
Given that they're both coming from the same laptop, I'm not so sure.
With low frequencies, where it is hard to locate the source of the sound anyways, it works well, even without carefully arranging the distances, higher frequencies get trickier and you'll likely get good cancellation in some places and a terrible mushy noise in others.