On Fri, 28 Oct 2005 13:35:19 -0700, Richard Clark
wrote:

The rejection is psychological, not actual. It is what I meant by
"mind-space." The vectors do not add up to zero, the mind simply
ignores the off-band content like you would at a party listening to
that cute office temp's whispers when your wife is yelling across the
room at you.

Listen to a recording of that same scenario in mono and you WILL hear
your wife!


I understand the Bell Labs explored this effect (which they referred
to as the "cocktail party effect") when exploring the nature of
conversation for the purposes of novel approaches to telephony
multiplexing.

I don't think they developed a technology solution to exploit the
cocktail party effect, but they did incorporate their knowledge of the
statistical / syllabic / sentence characteristics in their Time
Assignment Speech Interpolation (TASI) equipments, and TASI was quite
successful.

I think the term we would use for the cocktail party effect on a phone
channel is "a crossed line", and you may be right in that the loss of
spatial information because of the mono channel may have been the
reason it didn't work.
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