"...The cocktail party effect: I'm not sure whether you're trying to be serious here or not. The cocktail party effect is where one is LESS able to hear due to reverberation.

The term 'cocktail party effect' is also used to refer to the selective attention and the ability of a listener to discern a 'signal' when more 'noise' is added. It can be approached from a neurocognitive viewpoint which deals mainly with contempuous complacency: a listener will sit there bored stiff if all he is going to have is hours of silence punctuated by moments of actual signal. To maintain selective attention, add some noise.
A listener can be bombarded with sounds from many speakers but can selectively pay attention to one particular speaker even though all messages are intelligent and of similar form and content often due to the presence of background noise and social cues. This is one reason why trying to develop a neural network that will isolate one speaker in a crowded room does not seem to get anywhere, yet a human can do it intuitively.