Pitch differences enable selective listening to one talker amid competing voices

Evidence

Pitch plays a very important role for the perception of speech and music — we use pitch to identify voices, perceive emotion and intonation in speech, and hear melodies in music. Pitch perception also is important for our ability to represent and understand speech in the presence of background sounds. The ability to represent and follow a melody is important for perceiving music and allows a trained ear to listen in on a single instrument playing within an orchestra. This same process also likely influences our ability to focus on a single talker in a room, essentially inhibiting the other talkers to improve understanding. — Jennifer Lentz, Psychoacoustics- Perception of Normal…, 1311

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to cocktail-party-effect literature on auditory scene analysis and stream segregation.

Related

• Pitch enables voice identification and the cocktail party listening effect (similarity 0.94)
• Impaired pitch perception hampers understanding speech amid background noise (similarity 0.84)
• Pitch perception deficits from hearing loss impair speech segregation from noise. (similarity 0.83)
• Pitch shifts with intensity but individual listener variability is large. (similarity 0.83)
• Pitch cues convey identity, intonation, and emotion beyond mere speech content (similarity 0.83)
• Simultaneously presented tones sharpen pitch discrimination down to beat disappearance (similarity 0.81)
• Individual listeners differ in situational strengths, not just overall speech-in-noise ability. (similarity 0.81)
• Attentive focus on a particular timbre changes which auditory stream the ear follows. (similarity 0.81)
• Pitch lacks a magnitude dimension, complicating its subjective measurement (similarity 0.81)
• Pitch is coded by different mechanisms above and below roughly 3 kHz (similarity 0.81)
• Listeners base perceived loudness on sounds they attend to, ignoring others (similarity 0.80)
• Humans can isolate a single speaker amid competing voices and noise (similarity 0.80)
• Noise and reverberation distort concurrent speech perception through different mechanisms (similarity 0.80)
• Attention shapes what a listener perceives as loud in complex soundscapes (similarity 0.80)
• Pitch depends only on spectrum and periodicity, not volume or direction. (similarity 0.79)