Sounds Odd #2: – ‘The Cocktail Party Effect,’ by Elizabeth Holmes
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SOUNDS ODD Fun Facts About the Science of Sound By Elizabeth Holmes #2. ‘The Cocktail Party Effect’ |
(VOXtra) – Ever been in a noisy environment and been able to pick out
a single conversation?
I’ll bet you have! Most of us have. And the good
news is, this turns out to be a natural human ability. Some call it “The Cocktail Party Effect.”
Researchers at the University of California San
Francisco, Nima Mesgarani and Edward F. Chang, recently published fascinating
details of their research into this kind of selective hearing in Nature: The
International Journal of Science.
Why does this matter to voice actors? Because we all want OUR voice to be the one
that’s heard!
PROBING THE BRAIN
Megarani’s and Chang’s experiment involved brain
surgery on patients with severe epilepsy.
Electrodes on the brain’s surface (beneath the skull) revealed that the
auditory cortex reacts only to one targeted speaker at a time.
It’s “as if subjects were listening to that
speaker alone,” they write.
This discovery may lead to better speech recognition systems, and
help for those with speech perception disorders.
DEEP MALE VOICE REMEMBERED MOST
What relevance does it have for those of us who
depend on being heard above the cacophony of daily life?
Well, it turns out that gender may play a role in a
listener’s perception of the importance of the speaker’s message. Consider this research from David Smith and
colleagues from the University of Aberdeen in the UK.
Smith and his
colleagues conducted an experiment in which they showed a group of women visual
images, then linked those images with the name of the object spoken by a
variety of different voices.
Later,
when confronted with similar (but not identical) versions of those images,
those women consistently had better recall of images that had been introduced
by a deep male voice. Unfortunately,
they did not do as well with other voices.
EVOLVING THEORY …
Researchers postulate that this memory link developed as an evolutionary
advantage to women seeking potential mates.
As for the flip side, I have not yet been
able to find research that confirms ways to help men listen to women, then
remember what they said. (Please, for the sake of women everywhere, let someone, somewhere, be
studying this!) I’ll keep looking.
In the meantime, test your audio
skills. Take this fun test and see if you can
distinguish one message in a mix of voices at this fun website sponsored by the
University of California San Francisco:
http://bit.ly/SelectiveHearingTest
Articles
referenced in this piece include:
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ABOUT ELIZABETH
Elizabeth
Holmes is a writer, voice actor, and staff editor at VoiceOverXtra,
based in Northern California. She is also editor of VoiceOverXtra’s book
division, including Voice Over Legal, by voice actor / attorney Robert Sciglimpaglia.
Email: Elizabeth@HolmesVoice.com