A Review of The Cocktail Party Effect

The “cocktail party effect”—the ability to focus one’s listening attention on a single talker among a cacophony of conversations and background noise—has been recognized for some time. This specialized listening ability may be because of characteristics of the human speech production system, the auditory system, or high-level perceptual and language processing. This paper investigates the literature on what is known about the effect, from the original technical descriptions through current research in the areas of auditory streams and spatial display systems. The underlying goal of the paper is to analyze the components of this effect to uncover relevant attributes of the speech production and perception chain that could be exploited in future speech communication systems. The motivation is to build a system that can simultaneously present multiple streams of speech information such that a user can focus on one stream, yet easily shift attention to the others. A set of speech applications and user interfaces that take advantage of the ability to computationally simulate the cocktail party effect are also considered.