The cocktail party problem: What is it? How can it be solved? And why should students of bioacoustics study it?

Abstract

Auditory scene analysis refers to mechanisms that parse a composite acoustic waveform into perceptually distinct auditory objects or streams that correspond to distinct sound sources in the environment. A familiar and well-studied example of a difficult auditory scene analysis task is the cocktail party problem, which refers to the difficulty we have perceiving speech in noisy social environments comprised of multiple people talking simultaneously. Students of human hearing and computer engineering study auditory scene analysis, in part, because people with hearing impairments and computer algorithms for speech recognition do a poor job of solving the cocktail party problem compared to people with normal hearing. Of course, the cocktail party problem is not unique to humans. The animal behavior literature provides numerous examples of cocktail-party-like social environments for animal acoustic communication (e.g., choruses, roosts, colonies, creches). Compared to previous work on humans, however, students of animal bioacoustics have devoted little attention to how animals that signal in groups or networks solve their own cocktail party problems. This talk will briefly review some issues in auditory scene analysis relevant to the study of animal acoustic communication and present the case for why these issues deserve further study by students of bioacoustics.