The Cocktail Party Revisited
Irwin W. Pollack · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1958
The employment of directional information of the desired talker in a multitalker environment has been termed the “cocktail party effect.” We have attempted to determine whether the addition of (1) “comb” filtering, which enhances the perception of spatiality [M. R. Schroeder, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 29, 774 (1957)], or (2) splitting the speech frequency range, which enhances multichannel listening [W Spieth and J. Webster, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 27, 866 (1953)] will improve the cocktail party effect, as previously defined [I. Pollack and J. M. Pickett, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 29, 1262 (1957)]. The introduction of frequency separation does not remove the cocktail party effect. Intelligibility decreases as the frequency subdivision becomes more gross. However, it may be noted that a communication system based upon crude frequency separation and binaural listening may still be effective for certain instances of low-information communications. Specifically, PB monosyllabic word intelligibility of over 30% may be achieved with 4 background talkers in each of two split-frequency channels. This is equivalent to employing 11 transmitters, shared in pairs among 55 different talkers.