Humans can isolate a single speaker amid competing voices and noise

Evidence

One of the most remarkable capabilities of the human auditory system is sound segregation, or source separation. A traditional example is the so-called cocktail party effect, referring to our ability to focus on a single speaker in a multi-speaker situation, or in strong background noise. Psychophysical tests have found that subjects use many cues in stream segregation in such cases (Bronkhorst, 2000). — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1329

Categorization

• XREF: The cocktail party effect is the canonical example motivating computational auditory scene analysis and blind source separation algorithms.
• SHARE: Worth sending to anyone building hearing aids or voice-assistant front-ends; the cocktail party effect is their core engineering challenge.