Speech Separation by Humans and Machines

The "cocktail-party effect" - the ability to focus on one voice in a sea of noises - is a highly sophisticated skill that is usually effortless to listeners but largely impossible for machines. Investigating and unravelling this capacity spans numerous fields including psychology, physiology, engineering, and computer science. All these perspectives are brought together in this volume which, for the first time, provides a comprehensive and authoritative discussion of our understanding of how humans separate speech, and the state of the art in approaching these abilities with machines.