> Humans can’t process multiple audio streams simultaneously.
Yes they can, they can process two, and no more than two. Being able to listen to a conversation where multiple people are talking at the same time isn't processing different audio streams. It's assigning a set of sounds heard over time by timbre, subject (meaning) or relative volume to subsets representing different theoretical sources. People have very little problem doing this with a small number of potential sources (probably another seven plus or minus two thing.)
Even in large crowds, we can often pick out a few individual voices of interest (if distinctive enough in timbre, position and movement (judged by volume and pitch changes), or accent/wording/subject, and follow those voices while disregarding the rest of them.
edit: we might suck at multitasking, but that's not a problem a computer would have. I can't follow multiple speakers at once if they're not interacting with each other, and they're speaking quickly and overlapping, but that's a problem with context switching. With a computer I can just route the separated voices to systems that will handle them. Everybody gets their own waiter.
Yes they can, they can process two, and no more than two. Being able to listen to a conversation where multiple people are talking at the same time isn't processing different audio streams. It's assigning a set of sounds heard over time by timbre, subject (meaning) or relative volume to subsets representing different theoretical sources. People have very little problem doing this with a small number of potential sources (probably another seven plus or minus two thing.)
Even in large crowds, we can often pick out a few individual voices of interest (if distinctive enough in timbre, position and movement (judged by volume and pitch changes), or accent/wording/subject, and follow those voices while disregarding the rest of them.
edit: we might suck at multitasking, but that's not a problem a computer would have. I can't follow multiple speakers at once if they're not interacting with each other, and they're speaking quickly and overlapping, but that's a problem with context switching. With a computer I can just route the separated voices to systems that will handle them. Everybody gets their own waiter.