'Yanny vs. Laurel' Reveals Flaws In How We Listen To Audio (theproaudiofiles.com)

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few days, you've probably heard about the controversy over "Yanny" and "Laurel." The internet has been abuzz over an audio clip in which the name being said depends on the listener. Some hear "Laurel" while others hear "Yanny." Ian Vargo, an audio enthusiast who spends most of his working hours of the day listening to and editing audio, helps explain why we hear the name that we do: Human speech is actually composed of many frequencies, in part because we have a resonant chest cavity which creates lower frequencies, and the throat and mouth which creates higher frequencies. The word "laurel" contains a combination of both which are therefore present in the original recording at vocabulary.com, but the clip that you most likely heard has accentuated higher frequencies due to imperfections in the audio that were created by data compression. To make it worse, the playback device that many people first heard the audio clip playing out of was probably a speaker system built into a cellular phone, which is too small to accurately recreate low frequencies.

This helpful interactive tool from The New York Times allows you to use a slider to more clearly hear one or the other. Pitch shifting the audio clip up seems to accentuate "laurel" whereas shifting it down accentuates "yanny." In summary, this perfect storm of the human voice creating both low and high frequencies, the audio clip having been subject to data compression used to create smaller, more convenient files, and our tendency to listen out of devices with subpar playback components lead to an apparent near-even split of the population hearing "laurel" or "yanny."

Comments

Another example

[Knightman]

Brain storm or Green needle:
https://youtu.be/5pRY3wlKwm8

Anticipate the word you want to hear and you will hear it.

Anybody hear "Yarry"?

[jtgd]

One thing I haven't heard anyone mention is a third hearing for the word. When I listen to the 'Yanny' version what it sounds like to me is 'Yarry' (starts with Y, rhymes with 'Larry').

Does anyone else hear it that way?

Best tested with no prior knowledge of the test

[thegreatbob]

My roommate tried showing this to me, and given the context, my brain went into hyper-analytical mode. On the first listen, it sounded very much like both of the words played in different tonalities and relatively coherent modulation (as though they were rendered with some sort of speech synth), though Laurel was more understated on the speakers in use (internal TV speakers). If I had not been tainted by assumptions of what to expect, I'd most likely have heard Yanny or Ronny or similar. Psychoacoustics is fun :3, and I'm curious to how they produced the sound byte (may already be known, but I haven't had a chance to follow up on it)