The Cocktail Party Effect

Sound as we know it is the vibration between air particles, triggering our ear drums, sending the signal to our brains and perceiving it as sound (White, 2012). The cocktail party phenomenon refers to a situation in which one can only focus on one part of an environment that contains a cacophony of conversations and background noise, while filtering everything else out, yet highly relevant stimuli such as one’s own name can suddenly capture attention in this situation (Moray,1959). Investigations have shown that approximately 33% of subjects report hearing their own name in a noisy room (Conway, Cowan & Bunting, 2001). The Cocktail Party Effect can be seen in a variety of perspectives. From a listener’s point of view, the task is simply an impulse. However, in attempts to psychologically explain this effect, an extensive, complex amount of evidence has been brought together. Although, it is still to be fully explained. There are many interactions between the signal, the auditory system, and the central nervous system. Acoustically, separating out one person's speech from spectrograms with signals from several speakers in a noisy environment is something not even an expert spectrogram reader could do (Bregman, 1990). It has been shown that users can shift attention, or switch between background channels and foreground channels or in other words, scan between them while it is unclear how much useful information from background channels can be gleaned when attending to a particular foreground channel (Arons,1992).

Moray, N. (1959). Attention in dichotic listening: Affective cues and the influence of instructions. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology, 11(1), 56-60.

White, B. (2012) . What Are Frequency And Amplitude. Retrieved from Foundations of Audio: EQ and Filters Lynda.com

Conway, A. R., Cowan, N., & Bunting, M. F. (2001). The cocktail party phenomenon revisited: The importance of working memory capacity. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 8(2), 331-335.

A. S. Bregman. Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual Organization of Sound. MIT Press, 1990.

Arons, B. (1992). A review of the cocktail party effect. Journal of the American Voice I/O Society, 12(7), 35-50.