The Cocktail Party The Cocktail Party The Cocktail Party is a play by T. S. Eliot. Elements of the play are based on "Alcestis", by the Ancient Greek playwright Euripides. The play was the most popular of Eliot's seven plays in his lifetime, although his 1935 play, "Murder in the Cathedral", is better remembered today. It was written while Eliot was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1948. "The Cocktail Party" was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949. In 1950 the play had successful runs in London and New York theaters (the Broadway production received the 1950
Cocktail party effect of many pilots over a single loudspeaker made the controller's task very difficult. The effect was first defined and named "the cocktail party problem" by Colin Cherry in 1953. Cherry conducted attention experiments in which participants listened to two different messages from a single loudspeaker at the same time and tried to separate them; this was later termed a dichotic listening task. (See Broadbent section below for more details). His work reveals that the ability to separate sounds from background noise is affected by many variables, such as the sex of the speaker, the direction from which the sound is