Outer hair cell damage destroys the cocktail party effect

Evidence

Sensorineural hearing impairments often degrade the ability to discriminate sound sources from one another, leading to problems in understanding speech in the presence of background noise or reverberation. The so-called cocktail party effect – the ability to listen to and understand a single speaker in the presence of numerous other speakers – is due primarily to the functioning of the outer hair cells in the cochlea. Thus, if these cells are damaged, the hearingin-noise ability of the individual is degraded. Problems also arise in reverberant environments even without background noise, since the late reverberation masks the direct sound and early reflections. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2664

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to noise research from One Square Inch of Silence and The Soundscape — the physical basis for why the noise-battered world degrades comprehension.
• CANDY: A quick conversational fact: the ability to pick one voice out of a crowd physically depends on cochlear outer hair cells.