Erratum: Musical training, individual differences and the cocktail party problem

Abstract Are musicians better able to understand speech in noise than non-musicians? Recent findings have produced contradictory results. Here we addressed this question by asking musicians and non-musicians to understand target sentences masked by other sentences presented from different spatial locations, the classical ‘cocktail party problem’ in speech science. We found that musicians obtained a substantial benefit in this situation, with thresholds ~6 dB better than non-musicians. Large individual differences in performance were noted particularly for the non-musically trained group. Furthermore, in different conditions we manipulated the spatial location and intelligibility of the masking sentences, thus changing the amount of ‘informational masking’ (IM) while keeping the amount of ‘energetic masking’ (EM) relatively constant. When the maskers were unintelligible and spatially separated from the target (low in IM), musicians and non-musicians performed comparably. These results suggest that the characteristics of speech maskers and the amount of IM can influence the magnitude of the differences found between musicians and non-musicians in multiple-talker “cocktail party” environments. Furthermore, considering the task in terms of the EM-IM distinction provides a conceptual framework for future behavioral and neuroscientific studies which explore the underlying sensory and cognitive mechanisms contributing to enhanced “speech-in-noise” perception by musicians.

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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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Modeling the Cocktail Party Problem

Springer Handbook of Auditory Research - The Auditory System at the Cocktail Party ◽

10.1007/978-3-319-51662-2_5 ◽

2017 ◽

pp. 111-135 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Mounya Elhilali

Keyword(s):

Cocktail Party ◽

Cocktail Party Problem

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Musicians upweight pitch during prosodic categorization

10.31234/osf.io/c4396 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Ashley E Symons ◽

Adam Tierney

Keyword(s):

Individual Differences ◽

Musical Training ◽

Prior Experience ◽

Acoustic Cues ◽

Task Relevance ◽

Potential Predictor ◽

Cue Weighting ◽

Multiple Dimensions ◽

Linguistic Focus ◽

Speech Categorization

Speech perception requires the integration of evidence from acoustic cues across multiple dimensions. Individuals differ in their cue weighting strategies, i.e. the weight they assign to different acoustic dimensions during speech categorization. In two experiments, we investigate musical training as one potential predictor of individual differences in prosodic cue weighting strategies. Attentional theories of speech categorization suggest that prior experience with the task-relevance of a particular acoustic dimensions leads that dimension to attract attention. Therefore, Experiment 1 tested whether musicians and non-musicians differed in their ability to selectively attend to pitch and loudness in speech. Compared to non-musicians, musicians showed enhanced dimension-selective attention to pitch but not loudness. In Experiment 2, we tested the hypothesis that musicians would show greater pitch weighting during prosodic categorization due to prior experience with the task-relevance of pitch cues in music. In this experiment, listeners categorized phrases that varied in the extent to which pitch and duration signaled the location of linguistic focus and phrase boundaries. During linguistic focus categorization only, musicians up-weighted pitch compared to non-musicians. These results suggest that musical training is linked with domain-general enhancements of the salience of pitch cues, and that this increase in pitch salience may lead to to an up-weighting of pitch during some prosodic categorization tasks. These findings also support attentional theories of cue weighting, in which more salient acoustic dimensions are given more importance during speech categorization.

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Cocktail Party Problem

Machine Audition ◽

10.4018/978-1-61520-919-4.ch003 ◽

2010 ◽

pp. 61-79 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Tariqullah Jan ◽

Wenwu Wang

Keyword(s):

Sparse Coding ◽

Source Separation ◽

Auditory Scene Analysis ◽

Future Research ◽

Cocktail Party ◽

Analysis Model ◽

Computational Auditory Scene Analysis ◽

Cocktail Party Problem ◽

Auditory Scene ◽

Future Research Directions

Cocktail party problem is a classical scientific problem that has been studied for decades. Humans have remarkable skills in segregating target speech from a complex auditory mixture obtained in a cocktail party environment. Computational modeling for such a mechanism is however extremely challenging. This chapter presents an overview of several recent techniques for the source separation issues associated with this problem, including independent component analysis/blind source separation, computational auditory scene analysis, model-based approaches, non-negative matrix factorization and sparse coding. As an example, a multistage approach for source separation is included. The application areas of cocktail party processing are explored. Potential future research directions are also discussed.

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