focussed listening

It's amazing how we can actually direct ourselves to listen to what we want. I am not going into any kind of psychological analysis, but a simple observation.

In all meetings, you will find a number of cross converasations happening at some point of time. Past few meetings I have been noting how I was clearly filtering out most cross conversations and focussing on only one that I am interested in.

Not a very brilliant observation.. is it. But what proved the point was the recordings. Since these were brainstorming sessions, I was taking a recording of the meeting to review latter. (I normally get too engrossed in discussing and forget to take notes)

So I came back and wanted to listen it back so as to tak notes. And what I found was that, some of the pieces of conversation that was there in my mind was missing. These were times when there was some cross conversation. The dumb machine recorded everything. How I wish, it could also target and focus only on what I wanted to hear. Too much to ask from technology I guess but may be one day...

I guess multiple recorders pin pointing the origin of the sound and then recording each source separately should solve the purpose. Like in Photoshop and 'n' other apps using layers, you should get an option to listen to all the sources or just tick off the sources you dont want. Hmm... sounds good.. but how to do it without giving each person a separate mic...

Ok enough, back to work :)