question: Why when you’re listening to music and focus on something else do you stop hearing the majority of the music
comment: For those familiar with driving the same route day after day. Some days you may go from home to work or school to home and not recall specific events or scenery or traffic that you SAW on that route. What happened to that information, those sights, those sounds? THAT's where the music goes. It's there, in your memory, but it is subordinate to other stimuli to which you are giving priority.
passages: Stimulus filtering is also seen humans from a day-to-day basis. The phenomenon is called the cocktail party effect. When in a crowded room people tend to ignore other conversations and just focus on the one they are participating in. This effect also works in that when an individual hears their name in another’s conversation they immediately focus on that conversation.
  
  Section::::Examples.
  
  Section::::Examples.:Moths.
   In January 2018, Myers announced that the band had finished the recording the album and that Bass was working on finalizing the production and mixing of the album. 
  
  Section::::Themes and composition.
   Musicality, especially on the radio, contains musical aspects (timbre, emotional impact, melody), and artifacts that arise from non-musical aspects (soundstaging, dynamic range compression sonic balance). The introduction of these sonic artifacts affects the balance between these musical and non-musical aspects. When the volume of music is higher, these artifacts become more apparent, and because they are uncomfortable for the ear, cause listeners to "tune out" and lose focus or become tired. These listeners may then unconsciously avoid that type of music, or the radio station they may have heard it on.
  
  Section::::Causes.:Sensory overload.
   Section::::Mechanisms of masking.
  
  There are many different mechanisms of masking, one being suppression. This is when there is a reduction of a response to a signal due to the presence of another. This happens because the original neural activity caused by the first signal is reduced by the neural activity of the other sound.
   Section::::Neural basis.:Executive Control.
   Such "hovering" attention (as Freud put it in 1909 in the case of Little Hans) was a technical development on his part from the more aggressive listening and interpretation of the 1890s, as his shift from hypnosis to psychoanalysis took gradual shape.
  
  Section::::Later developments.
  
  Since Theodor Reik and his 1948 study "Listening with the Third Ear", more analytic emphasis has been placed on the dialectic between evenly suspended attention, and the analyst's cognitive working-over of what s/he hears. The part played by countertransference and by the analyst's role responsiveness has also been highlighted.
  
  Section::::Further reading.
   Other studies have demonstrated that perceptual and cognitive load affect spatial focusing of attention. These two mechanisms interact oppositely so that when cognitive load is decreased, perceptual load must be high to increase spatial attention focusing.
  
  Section::::Auditory alertness.
   Section::::Active listening in music.
  
  Active Listening has been developed as a concept in music and technology by François Pachet, researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris. Active listening in music refers to the idea that listeners can be given some degree of control on the music they listen to, by means of technological applications mainly based on artificial intelligence and information theory techniques, by opposition to traditional listening, in which the musical media is played passively by some neutral device
  
  Section::::History.
   The cocktail party effect illustrates how the brain inhibits input from environmental stimuli, while still processing sensory input from the attended stimulus. The cocktail party effect demonstrates sensory gating in hearing, but the other senses also go through the same process protecting primary cortical areas from being overwhelmed.
  
  Section::::Neural regions involved.
   Moreno and Mayer (2000) found evidence for auditory split attention when they tested learners with both ambient environmental sounds and music as they learned from instructional materials. Animation is processed in a visual channel but must be converted to the auditory channel. The extraneous cognitive load imposed by music or environmental sounds were not conducive to learning.
  
  These researchers studied learners that learned within an environment that had additional (extraneous) environmental sounds or music and found that learners performed significantly poorer on retention and transfer tests (Moreno, 2001).
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  BULLET::::- Cognitive load
  
  BULLET::::- Multimedia learning
  
  BULLET::::- Worked-example effect
   The active process is also known as the cochlear amplifier. This amplification increases vibrations of the basilar membrane through energy obtained from the Organ of Corti. As the stimulation increases, it is assumed that basilar membrane displacement, caused by the traveling wave, becomes continually more basal in regards to the cochlea. A sustained low-level stimulus can cause an energetic exhaustion of the active system which in turn prevents the passive system from activating.
  
  Section::::Physiology.:Affected mechanisms.:Excessive vibrations.
   Section::::Neuroscience.
   On balance, it appears likely that under controlled temporal conditions, denser and more complex music is associated with a higher number of fixations, of shorter mean duration. This might be explained as an attempt by the music-reading process to provide more frequent 'refreshment' of the material being held in working memory, and may compensate for the need to hold more information in working memory.
  
  Section::::Reader skill.
   Temporal Theory posits that the cause is from looking at the phase locking to tell what the pitch is. This theory has a hard time explaining diplacusis. There are some examples of pitch which don’t have an "edge" on the basilar membrane, which this would account for—i.e. white noise, clicks, etc. (need a reference)
   Section::::Neurological basis (and binaural processing).
  
  Auditory attention in regards to the cocktail party effect primarily occurs in the left hemisphere of the superior temporal gyrus (where the primary auditory cortex is); a fronto-parietal network involving the inferior frontal gyrus, superior parietal sulcus, and intraparietal sulcus also accounts for the acts of attention-shifting, speech processing, and attention control. Both the target stream (the more important information being attended to) and competing/interfering streams are processed in the same pathway within the left hemisphere, but fMRI scans shows that target streams are treated with more attention than competing streams. 
   Dichotic listening also relates to the third basic property of consciousness: Selectivity which is the capacity to include some objects but not others.
  
  Section::::History.
   Blum’s teaching career began at Western Illinois University (1967–73), followed by an assistant professorship at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until 1977. He then moved to Toronto's York University where he remained for ten years, founding the MFA program "Music and Contemporary Cultures" the first of its kind Canada. In 1987 he founded the ethnomusicology program at City College of New York Graduate Center where he worked until his retirement in 2015.
  
  Section::::Scholarship and legacy.
   When exposed to a multitude of sounds from several different sources, sensory overload may occur. This overstimulation can result in general fatigue and loss of sensation in the ear. The associated mechanisms are explained in further detail down below. Sensory overload usually occurs with environmental stimuli and not noise induced by listening to music.
  
  Section::::Physiology.
  
  As with any type of hearing-related disorder, the related physiology is within the ear and central auditory system. With regards to listening fatigue, the relevant mechanical and biochemical mechanisms primarily deal with inner ear and cochlea.
  
  Section::::Physiology.:Associated anatomy.
    Vision, sound, smell, touch, and taste are processed together pre-attentively when more than one sensory stimuli are present. This multisensory integration increases activity in the superior temporal sulcus (STS), thalamus, and superior colliculus. Specifically, the pre-attentive process of multisensory integration works jointly with attention to activate brain regions such as the STS. Multisensory integration seems to give a person the advantage of greater comprehension if both auditory and visual stimuli are being processed together. But it is important to note that multisensory integration is affected by what a person pays attention to and their current goals.
  
  Section::::Plasticity.
   In a noisy environment the MOC efferent pathways are required to be active in two distinct ways. The first is an automatic response to the multiple sound streams arriving at the two ears, while the second is a top-down corticofugal attention driven response. The purpose of both is an attempt to enhance the signal to noise ratio between the speech stream being listened to and all other sound streams.
   Section::::Franssen effect F2.:Conclusions.
  
  This effect gives some information about the capabilities of the human auditory system to localize sound sources in enclosed rooms:
  
  BULLET::::- The human auditory system is able to localize a sound source in reverberant sound fields, if there are fast signal changes or signal onsets. (Loudspeaker 1 was correctly localized at the beginning of the experiment.)
  
  BULLET::::- The human auditory system is not able to localize signals with a constant amplitude and spectrum in reverberant sound fields. (The fade over to loudspeaker 2 was not recognized by the listeners.)
   Section::::Characteristics: effects on neural responses.:Stimulus and attention dependence.
  
  The suppressive effect is often dependent on the contrast, orientation, and direction of motion of the stimulus stimulating the surround. These properties are highly dependent on the brain area and the individual neuron being studied. In MT, for instance, cells can be sensitive to the direction and velocity of stimuli up to 50 to 100 times the area of their classical receptive fields.
   In order to determine the time periods, where the direct sound prevails and which can be used for directional evaluation, the auditory system analyzes loudness changes in different critical bands and also the stability of the perceived direction. If there is a strong attack of the loudness in several critical bands and if the perceived direction is stable, this attack is in all probability caused by the direct sound of a sound source, which is entering newly or which is changing its signal characteristics. This short time period is used by the auditory system for directional and loudness analysis of this sound. When reflections arrive a little bit later, they do not enhance the loudness inside the critical bands in such a strong way, but the directional cues become unstable, because there is a mix of sound of several reflection directions. As a result, no new directional analysis is triggered by the auditory system.
   It has been posited that lateral connections are too slow and cover too little of the visual field to fully explain surround suppression. Feedback from higher areas may explain the discrepancies seen in mechanism for surround suppression based purely on lateral connections. There is evidence that inactivation of higher order areas results in reduced strength of surround suppression. At least one model of excitatory connections from higher levels has been formed in the effort to more fully explain surround suppression. However, recurrent feedback is difficult to determine using electrophysiology, and the potential mechanisms at play are not as well studied as feedforward or lateral connections.
   Section::::Critical reception.
  