The Cocktail Party Effect and Your Holiday Gatherings

The holiday season is well underway, and with the holidays often come holiday parties! You may have already attended a few gatherings yourself, or maybe you have some coming up. These parties all share some great characteristics: tasty food, festive music, and lots of friends and loved ones.

They all usually have another thing in common: noise.

Why is it that gatherings where we are meant to spend time with those nearest and dearest to us, reflecting on the past year and looking forward into the new one, are often so loud it’s impossible to discuss anything?

What you’re experiencing is a known problem: the cocktail party effect. Unfortunately, more isn’t necessarily merrier if you’re trying to have a conversation with someone in a crowded room. This article by Marshall Long from the Acoustics Today archive discusses why it’s so hard to understand speech in noisy settings (particularly those with lots of folks talking).

While researchers don’t have a solution for this common problem, they have looked into what’s going on in your brain when you’re trying to listen to someone talk in a noisy room. In a different article from Acoustics Today, Adrian KC Lee discusses neuroimaging tools that have allowed scientists to study how our brains understand speech in crowded environments. (Okay, so maybe this doesn’t solve your immediate problem of how you’re going to talk to your coworker or cousin at that party Saturday, but at least it’ll give you some interesting factoids to shout over the music?)

Hosting your own gathering and want to make it as hospitable to conversation as possible? If you’re going to be in a restaurant or other event space, this research from Murray Hodgson, Gavin Steininger, and Zohreh Razavi explains how to predict speech intelligibility in a eating establishment based on the number of people in the space. Plus, that article from Long’s that we mentioned earlier includes tips on how to reduce this annoying effect. Perhaps you can apply some of the ideas to absorb excess noise in your event space!

November 2023 JASA Cover

The November cover of JASA is now available! Check it out:

The cover image is from Figures 1 of “Contribution of acoustic cues to prominence ratings for four Mandarin vowels,” by Wei Zhang and Meghan Clayards. The Coordinating Editor for Speech Communication, Zhaoyan Zhang, says about the feature article: “There are many acoustic cues that speakers can use to focus listeners’ attention to words that most contribute to what they want to say. How these acoustics cues are used varies by speaker and is also constrained by other factors such as vowel types and tone contrasts in a tone language. This article is interesting in that it explores the different strategies speakers may use to signal focus for different vowels and tone contrasts in Mandarin.”

Some other research was also highlighted on the November JASA cover:

All the articles from the cover are free to read for a month after the cover is released, so be sure to check them out! You can find the whole issue at https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/issue/154/5.

11 2023 JASA Cover

Popular Social Media Posts – November

It’s time to look at some of last month’s most popular social media posts on Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn. The following posts got people to like, share, save, and perhaps most importantly, read the published research!

On the ASA Facebook page, a JASA Express Letter post featuring “Sound power of NASA’s lunar rockets: Space Launch System versus Saturn V” had really good engagement. You can visit the post first or read the article at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0022538.

Facebook - November social media

Facebook

Users on Instagram really liked the cover image from Acoustics for Engineers from ASA Press. You can check out the IG post or get the book yourself at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-662-63342-7

Instagram - November social media

Instagram

Then, on the The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) X (Twitter) account, the post featuring an article from the Fish Bioacoustics Special Issue shared multiple times. See the original tweet here or read the article at: https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0021878.

LinkedIn - November social media post

LinkedIn

Last, but certainly not least, a post inviting media to attend the press conference for the 185th ASA Meeting in Sydney, Australia piqued the interest of users on Linked In. See the original post and help spread the word by sharing the press release invitation at https://acoustics.org/press-conference/

Linked In - November Social Media

Linked In

In fact, many of our upcoming social media posts will be about 185th Meeting, Acoustics 23 and will contain #Acoustics23. If you will be attending, be sure to include the hashtag so that we can follow along! We are especially looking forward to the POMAs that come after the meeting!

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Active and Tunable Acoustic Metamaterials

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) and JASA Express Letters are calling for papers for a joint Special Issue on Active and Tunable Acoustics Metamaterials. This Special Issue invites all manuscripts exploring new active and tunable acoustic or elastodynamic metamaterials. Guest Editors for this Special Issue are Michael R. Haberman, Christina Naify, Bogdan Popa, and Serife Tol. The submission deadline is September 31, 2024. Read more here!

How joint Special Issues work: Authors have the option to select JASA or JASA Express Letters to submit a paper to for a Special Issue. Accepted papers will be published in the next available regular issue of the selected journal and identified as belonging to the Special Issue. After all papers have published for the Special Issue, they will be included in a cross-journal online collection at the JASA and JASA Express Letters websites. For more on how to submit, see the Call for Papers.

Special Issue CFP

New Across Acoustics Episode: Exploring Timbre of Stradivari Violins

Why is the sound quality of some violins preferred over others?  In this episode, we talk to Carlo Andrea Rozzi (National Research Council of Italy) and Massimo Grassi (University of Padova) about the myth surrounding Stradivari violins as well as their research into the aspects of violin timbre that cause listeners to prefer one instrument to another.

(Like the episode? Read the article!)