- Also known as *binaural discrimination* : the ability to discriminate sounds better through the use of 2 ears than through recording.
Standing in a cocktail party full of many different intruding sounds, we are able to understand 1 person\'s speech even though a microphone\'s recording would sound unintelligible. A number of factors help this:
- Spatial hearing helps us focus on sound from 1 direction
- Visual clues - lip reading
- Both participants likely have some background together, which limits the range of possible topics
- When all else fails, we fake it, smiling knowingly and filling in the gaps from our shared background and experience
This obviously affects recording methods. The way suggested is to record a master shot with only the principal characters talking and the others mimicking conversation, then using that audio track for all their conversation (not using audio from closeups or other shots), then recording basic room tone and a basic "babble" or "walla" track of chatter to run in the background. This essentially isolates all of the different sound layers.
