The Auditory System at the Cocktail PartyThe 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.