The handling of disturbances to audio signals may be improved with an adaptive noise cancellation (ANC) system that performs frequency-domain adaption. The ANC systems may be configured to determine if a disturbance is present at a first frequency in the second input signal received from the reference microphone. The ANC systems may update an algorithm of an adaptive filter based, at least in part, on the first input signal, the second input signal, and a feedback signal that is based on an output of the adaptive filter by changing parameters of the algorithm such that the adaptive filter adapts around the first frequency differently than other frequencies when the disturbance is present.