[noasaservice]

> The relevant phenomena are known as localization and the cocktail party effect. If you put a microphone in the middle of a cacophonous cocktail party, it would be hard to follow any given conversation by listening to just that one combined signal. But if you're actually there, your brain can hone in on any of several conversations.

That's because a human is not 1 microphone. It's 2 microphones, with a known distance between the 2, which allows realtime 3d positioning and isolation of sound to an area.

The open source hardware "ReSpeaker" allows to start experimenting how a microphone array works, including why the cocktail party effect doesn't really affect us in most cases.

The notable exception is if there's a signal that is generated perfectly on the plane perpendicular to the 2 ears. Then, humans have a hard time localizing it between front or back (180deg swap). We can still get an angular vector where the sound is. However simply turning your head removes this constraint exception.

(Also bring able to your your head and move your body also shows a visual-acoustic SLAM algorithm going on in your brain.)

[lebuffon]

1. "That's because a human is not 1 microphone." true 2. "It's 2 microphones, with a known distance between the 2" 3. "which allows realtime 3d positioning and isolation of sound to an area"

#3 does not follow from statement #2.

The missing element is that 3D localization is due to the pinna.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.1967.005...