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The Cocktail Party Effect

Page history last edited by Randy Coppinger 12 years, 7 months ago

If anything here is confusing, inspiring or absolutely incorrect your comments would be much appreciated.  This is a work in progress and your help improving the information is requested.  Thanks!

 

< Human Hearing

 

Have you ever tried to record one person talking in a room while a lot of other people were talking?  If you used one mic and it was not up close to your desired talker, it was probably difficult to understand that one person because all of those other voices were in the mic too.  But there in person, it was easy for you to listen to that one talker.  Why don’t ears and mics work the same way?

 

Our ability to choose one sound source from many others is sometimes called The Cocktail Party Effect.  We can aurally sift through many simultaneous sounds and focus on just one.  Our Ears + Head system helps us assign a unique location to each sound source.  A single microphone only allows us to relate sounds to that one place where the mic is located.  We get much more information from our Ears + Head, so we can separate all of the sounds, then the brain does the sifting.

 

When we record and mix in stereo, we can present more ideas to listeners if we allow them to aurally select the sounds – drums, guitars, vocals, etc. – by presenting those sounds in stereo.  Even when our stereo presentation is pure Fantasy, different locations for sounds help us hear more.  In a way, it is like allowing listeners to walk around in the space between the speakers and listen to different “talkers” at a cocktail party.

 

If you are trying to fit a lot of different sounds into a mix and want each one to be heard, stereo can help.  But if all of the sounds are located in the same place, or if they are everywhere simultaneously, you loose The Cocktail Party Effect.

 

This is not only true for direct sounds, but also for Ambience.  If you have ever recorded music in a large space with just one mic, you know that excess Early Reflections and Reverb can overwhelm, making it difficult to hear details in the music.  Recording mono in a large, reflective space can sound awful.  But with a good stereo presentation your Ears + Head and your brain help you differentiate the sounds.  The Precedence Effect seems to work much better when a direct sound seems like one, point-source but the Ambience arrives from multiple directions. The exact same amount of Early Reflections and Reverb that was awful in mono is easier to separate from the direct sound when presented effectively in stereo.

 

There are surely a lot of techniques that recording engineers use to help listeners hear all of the different parts of a musical presentation.  Used well, stereo is a true ally for making everything audible because it takes advantage of The Cocktail Party Effect.

 

Correlation >

 

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