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It’s the bane (or savior) of every holiday cocktail party: the constant background buzz that makes it hard to hear the guy from accounting droning on. Now, researchers have taken a step toward understanding how people’s hearing systems pick out one sound among many.
The key is repetition, according to experiments reported the week of January 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Hearing a sound again and again in different auditory mixtures allows a person to separate it out and recognize it, the work suggests.
“Repetition alone may be a cue for sound segregation,” says Christophe Micheyl, a researcher in auditory perception and cognition at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who was not involved in the study.