Just picture the scene: you’re at a cocktail party, talking to someone you would like to get to know better but the background noise is making it hard to concentrate. Luckily, humans are very gifted at listening to someone speaking while many other people are talking loudly at the same time. This so-called cocktail-party-phenomenon is based on the ability of the human auditory system to decompose the acoustic world into discrete objects of perception. Now researchers have a better understanding of how this occurs. Different speakers have different temporal fine structure in their voiced speech and such signals are represented in different areas of the auditory cortex according to this different time structure. This provides a new solution for the cocktail party problem whereby people are able to hear and understand their conversation partner at a party in spite of considerable background noise.