Cocktail Party Processing

Few books in the burgeoning field of couple psychoanalysis have garnered as much admiration as James Fisher's The Uninvited Guest: Emerging from Narcissism towards Marriage. In this memorial essay, the author pays tribute to the late Dr Fisher and to his perennial book which explores the ways in which pathological narcissism, among other factors, inhibit the development of spousal intimacy, often destroying partnerships entirely. The author describes the creative way in which Fisher drew upon great works of literature, most notably William Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale, and T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party, as well as long-forgotten clinical material from Fisher's predecessors at the Family Discussion Bureau (forerunner of the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships), in order to understand the ways in which marital partners struggle with false self couplings. The author assesses the importance of Fisher's contribution in the context of the history of couple psychoanalysis.

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State of Fashion: Searching for the New Luxury

APRIA Journal ◽

10.37198/apria.01.00.a2 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 11-16

Author(s):

José Teunissen

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Daily Life ◽

Life Cycles ◽

The Other ◽

Century Model ◽

Cocktail Party ◽

The Public ◽

Other Hand ◽

The One

In the last few years, it has often been said that the current fashion system is outdated, still operating by a twentieth-century model that celebrates the individualism of the 'star designer'. In I- D, Sarah Mower recently stated that for the last twenty years, fashion has been at a cocktail party and has completely lost any connection with the public and daily life. On the one hand, designers and big brands experience the enormous pressure to produce new collections at an ever higher pace, leaving less room for reflection, contemplation, and innovation. On the other hand, there is the continuous race to produce at even lower costs and implement more rapid life cycles, resulting in disastrous consequences for society and the environment.

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Listen, Watch and Understand at the Cocktail Party: Audio-Visual-Contextual Speech Separation

10.21437/interspeech.2020-2028 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Chenda Li ◽

Yanmin Qian

Keyword(s):

Speech Separation ◽

Cocktail Party

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Acute alcohol intoxication and the cocktail party problem: do “mocktails” help or hinder?

Psychopharmacology ◽

10.1007/s00213-021-05924-6 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Alistair J. Harvey ◽

C. Philip Beaman

Keyword(s):

Working Memory ◽

Memory Span ◽

Alcohol Intoxication ◽

Alcoholic Beverage ◽

Cognitive Capacity ◽

Cocktail Party ◽

Primary Input ◽

Cocktail Party Problem ◽

Null Effect ◽

Cocktail Party Effect

Abstract Rationale To test the notion that alcohol impairs auditory attentional control by reducing the listener’s cognitive capacity. Objectives We examined the effect of alcohol consumption and working memory span on dichotic speech shadowing and the cocktail party effect—the ability to focus on one of many simultaneous speakers yet still detect mention of one’s name amidst the background speech. Alcohol was expected either to increase name detection, by weakening the inhibition of irrelevant speech, or reduce name detection, by restricting auditory attention on to the primary input channel. Low-span participants were expected to show larger drug impairments than high-span counterparts. Methods On completion of the working memory span task, participants (n = 81) were randomly assigned to an alcohol or placebo beverage treatment. After alcohol absorption, they shadowed speech presented to one ear while ignoring the synchronised speech of a different speaker presented to the other. Each participant’s first name was covertly embedded in to-be-ignored speech. Results The “cocktail party effect” was not affected by alcohol or working memory span, though low-span participants made more shadowing errors and recalled fewer words from the primary channel than high-span counterparts. Bayes factors support a null effect of alcohol on the cocktail party phenomenon, on shadowing errors and on memory for either shadowed or ignored speech. Conclusion Findings suggest that an alcoholic beverage producing a moderate level of intoxication (M BAC ≈ 0.08%) neither enhances nor impairs the cocktail party effect.

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Multichannel acoustic source and image dataset for the cocktail party effect in hearing aid and implant users

Scientific Data ◽

10.1038/s41597-020-00777-8 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 7 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Tim Fischer ◽

Marco Caversaccio ◽

Wilhelm Wimmer

Keyword(s):

Hearing Aids ◽

Scientific Community ◽

Cocktail Party ◽

Acoustic Source ◽

Image Dataset ◽

Cocktail Party Effect ◽

Spatial Coordinates ◽

Acoustic Chamber ◽

Human Hearing ◽

Human Sense

AbstractThe Cocktail Party Effect refers to the ability of the human sense of hearing to extract a specific target sound source from a mixture of background noises in complex acoustic scenarios. The ease with which normal hearing people perform this challenging task is in stark contrast to the difficulties that hearing-impaired subjects face in these situations. To help patients with hearing aids and implants, scientists are trying to imitate this ability of human hearing, with modest success so far. To support the scientific community in its efforts, we provide the Bern Cocktail Party (BCP) dataset consisting of 55938 Cocktail Party scenarios recorded from 20 people and a head and torso simulator wearing cochlear implant audio processors. The data were collected in an acoustic chamber with 16 synchronized microphones placed at purposeful positions on the participants’ heads. In addition to the multi-channel audio source and image recordings, the spatial coordinates of the microphone positions were digitized for each participant. Python scripts were provided to facilitate data processing.

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Pop as Translation Strategy: Makishi Tsutomu's Political Pop in Okinawa

ARTMargins ◽

10.1162/artm_a_00208 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. 42-71

Author(s):

Hiroko Ikegami

Keyword(s):

Vietnam War ◽

Contemporary Art ◽

Economic Benefits ◽

Pop Art ◽

Cocktail Party ◽

Lingua Franca ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Japanese Imperialism ◽

Translation Strategy ◽

The Vietnam War

This essay makes the first sustained study of the Okinawan artist Makishi Tsutomu (1941–2015) who used American Pop Art vocabularies to describe the complex realities of US-occupied Okinawa. Focusing on his 1972 installation Commemorating the Reversion to the Great Empire of Japan, the essay examines the critical ambivalence of Makishi's Political Pop as a translation strategy. Despite his critique of both American and Japanese imperialism, Makishi was aware that Okinawa was inseparably entangled in it, especially in the context of the Vietnam War, which brought violence, but also economic benefits, to Okinawa. Despite his use of the American Pop idiom as a new lingua franca for contemporary art, Makishi's work did not reach either mainland or international audiences as the artist exhibited almost exclusively in Okinawa. By comparing Makishi's artistic strategies with those of a representative Okinawan novelist, Ōshiro Tatsuhiro, especially as articulated in his 1967 novella The Cocktail Party, the essay situates the significance of Makishi's project within the emerging discourse on the global neo-avant-garde.

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