A lovely evening of classical music at San Diego’s new Rady Shell at Jacobs Park leads to a conversation with an audio engineer about the term cocktail party effect, referring to the brain’s ability to focus in on the sound of one conversation despite being in a crowded room of people all talking to each other. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Cocktail Party Effect”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. I had the great good fortune recently to join some friends for a concert by the San Diego Symphony. And what made this evening really special is that the concert was outdoors at the new Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, which is this spectacular new venue right there on San Diego Bay. And thanks to the Shell’s design and the state-of-the-art acoustic system, the sound was also just stunning. In fact, Grant, the acoustics were so good that at intermission, we sought out the sound engineers to check out their board. And the symphony’s audio director was sitting there, and he had a score that he follows during the whole performance. And that’s because he’s responsible for creating what he called the cocktail effect. And so, of course, I got all excited to learn a new term because when you’re in a crowded setting and everybody’s talking, you can still tune in to what somebody near you is saying because your brain lets you focus on the sound of that one person and you filter out all the rest. And I learned that people who work in the acoustics field call that phenomenon the cocktail effect or the cocktail party effect.
And so that’s what the sound engineers were doing that evening. They were letting us focus in, for example, if a violinist had a solo. So it was this splendid evening all around, just, you know, gorgeous sound and a summer night by the bay. And I learned a new term.
Yeah, that’s a well-spent evening, right? Beautiful music, beautiful scenery, and beautiful language.
Yes. I figured you probably already knew that term.
Yeah.
I was all excited.
Yeah, it’s a good term, though. And the sound world is filled with language. We get lots of email and phone calls from people who want to share, they’re excited to share the language of their fields or their hobbies or something that they learned when they were out there working with professionals who do the same thing that they do, something that the old-timers taught the newbies.
We’d like to hear that too. 877-929-9673. What’s the lingo of your trade or hobby? Send it to us an email, words@waywordradio.org, or tell us and the world on Twitter @wayword.
