How To Hear At Holiday Parties

It’s known as the Cocktail Party effect, and no, it has nothing to do with morning after headaches. The Cocktail Party Effect is the inability to clearly hear what is being said by the nice person who is talking to you, largely because there are a dozen other people within earshot who are talking about something else. Now, from researchers at Cardiff University, comes a party trick that appears to make it much easier to understand what people are telling you, whether you want to know or not. Ready? Turn your head. More specifically, turn your head about 30 degrees to the left or right, so the words you want to hear are aimed on one of your ears, not both.  Futurity reports on the research, which, when tested in the laboratory, resulted in a 4-decibel improvement to intelligibility of speech in a noisy environment for both normal-hearing listeners and cochlear implant users. That may not sound like much of an improvement, but a 4-decibel improvement can be the difference between understanding nothing and perfect understanding. Next, to simulate a realistic restaurant listening situation, acoustic measurements were also taken at a restaurant, and used to create a virtual acoustic simulation. In the simulation normally hearing listeners were tested at each table with three different head orientations: facing the target talker, with a 30-degree head turn to the left, or with a 30-degree head turn to the right.