A nonlinear model of the binaural cocktail party effect

The ability of a binaural listener to concentrate on speech from a particul ar location whilst preferentially suppressing speech from other locations h as been termed the binaural "cocktail party" effect. The recently developed unsupervised artificial neural network models for blind signal processing have provided additional perspectives on the binaural cocktail party effect . This paper presents a model of the cocktail party effect based on a tempo ral anti-Hebbian adaptive maximum likelihood estimator. The complicating ef fects of reverberation and physically non-stationary speech sources on unwa nted speech suppression are empirically investigated. (C) 1998 Elsevier Sci ence B.V. All rights reserved.