Matthew HutsonSomehow, even in a room full of loud conversations, our brains can focus on a single voice in something called the cocktail party effect.
But the louder it gets—or the older you are—the harder it is to do. Now, researchers may have figured out how to fix that—with a machine learning technique called the cone of silence.Computer scientists trained a neural network, which roughly mimics the brain’s wiring, to locate and separate the voices of several people speaking in a room.
The network did so in part by measuring how long it took for the sounds to hit a cluster of microphones in the room’s center.When the researchers tested their setup with extremely loud background noise, they found that the cone of silence located two.