Party Out Loud

Every Friday or Saturday, I try to go with my friends to have a good time in ending that stressful week. We usually have dinner and kwentuhan session when we are together. But, as what most college students do, we also go to parties with free flowing drinks and non-stop music. Just feeling the good vibes of the music and the people around take my stress away and make me ready to face another loaded week ahead.

College parties are so different from other parties I have experienced in high school; so much fun than the latter. There, we talk to people we do not know, make new friends, talk our emotions out, express oneself without inhibition, and yet we do not forget what we usually do: kwentuhan.

Even the music is very loud and all the people are shouting, we still and somehow find a way to tell stories to another. Surprisingly, we grasp each other’s stories at least the gist. Scanning through terms in Perception, I found out that this phenomenon is called the Cocktail Party Effect. It is an impressive ability, sometimes under-appreciated, to listen to a talker even with the presence of other conversation and background music. Sometimes, it is used for eavesdropping a conversation while neglecting others and the music.

Lisa Stifelman (1994) conducted an experiment involving Cocktail Party Effect. She wanted to build auditory interfaces that would lessen the amount of time in listening. By presenting multiples of audio streams at the same time, the listener would focus on one stream but could get interesting and significant information through overhearing other.

In this study, the subjects were presented with multiple channels of audio and they were asked to perform listening comprehension and target monitoring at the same time. While listening, the subject should identify target words in audios played simultaneously. As a result of this study, Stifelman found out that as the number of channels increased, the performance of the two tasks decreased.

This shows that one cannot listen to more than one sound stimulus at a time. If possible, it would not be that accurate like what this study showed. And so, this just tells that this effect is very interesting and beneficial. Some are not aware of this ability and so, they do not try to listen even there is a loud sound playing in the background. But, we must not overuse this ability; or should I say, we must not use this to eavesdrop other people’s private conversation. Anyway, you cannot do that at the same time listening with your own friends because what you hear might not be accurate anymore. So, you would not totally grasp any at all.

Stifelman, L. J. (1994). The Cocktail Party Effect in Auditory Interfaces: A Study of Simultaneous Presentation. MIT Media Laboratory Technical Report.

Dean, J. (2009). The Cocktail Party Effect. PsyBlog: Understand YourMmind. Retrieved from http://www.spring.org.uk/2009/03/the-cocktail-party-effect.php