Plenty of people struggle to make sense of a multitude of converging voices in a crowded room. Commonly known as the “cocktail party effect,” people with hearing loss find it’s especially difficult to understand speech in a noisy environment. New research suggests that, for some listeners, this may have less to do with actually discerning sounds. Instead, it may be a processing problem in which two ears blend different sounds together – a condition known as binaural pitch fusion.