The cocktail party effect allows individuals to attend to specific sounds amidst a noisy environment by creating a cone of auditory attention.

“The cocktail party effect is where you are in an environment that's rich with sound, many sound waves coming from many different sources, many different things, so in a city, in a classroom, in a car that contains people having various conversations. You somehow need to be able to attend to specific components of those sound waves, meaning you need to hear certain people and not others. You and your brain are exquisitely good at creating a cone of auditory attention, a narrow band of attention with which you can extract the information you care about and wipe away or erase all the rest.”