The Auditory System at the Cocktail Party is a rather whimsical title that points to the very
serious challenge faced by listeners in most everyday environments: how to hear out sounds of
interest amid a cacophony of competing sounds. The volume presents the mechanisms for bottom-up
object formation and top-down object selection that the auditory system employs to meet that
challenge. Ear and Brain Mechanisms for Parsing the Auditory Scene by John C. Middlebrooks and
Jonathan Z. Simon Auditory Object Formation and Selection by Barbara Shinn-Cunningham Virginia
Best and Adrian K. C. Lee Energetic Masking and Masking Release by John F. Culling and Michael
A. Stone Informational Masking in Speech Recognition by Gerald Kidd Jr. and H. Steven Colburn
Modeling the Cocktail Party Problem by Mounya Elhilali Spatial Stream Segregation by John C.
Middlebrooks Human Auditory Neuroscience and the Cocktail Party Problem by Jonathan Z. Simon
Infants and Children at the Cocktail Party by Lynne Werner Older Adults at the Cocktail Party
by M. Kathleen Pichora-Fuller Claude Alain and Bruce A. Schneider Hearing with Cochlear
Implants and Hearing Aids in Complex Auditory Scenes by Ruth Y. Litovsky Matthew J. Goupell
Sara M. Misurelli and Alan Kan About the Editors: John C. Middlebrooks is a Professor in the
Department of Otolaryngology at the University of California Irvine with affiliate
appointments in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior the Department of Cognitive
Sciences and the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Jonathan Z. Simon is a Professor at the
University of Maryland College Park with joint appointments in the Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering the Department of Biology and the Institute for Systems Research.
Arthur N. Popper is Professor Emeritus and Research Professor in the Department of Biology at
the University of Maryland College Park. Richard R. Fay is Distinguished Research Professor of
Psychology at Loyola University Chicago. About the Series: The Springer Handbook of Auditory
Research presents a series of synthetic reviews of fundamental topics dealing with auditory
systems. Each volume is independent and authoritative taken as a set this series is the
definitive resource in the field.
