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'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."
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."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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And I heard “Turn me on, dead man” - but my wife swore she heard “Number nine”.
#DeleteChrome
Brain storm or Green needle:
https://youtu.be/5pRY3wlKwm8
Anticipate the word you want to hear and you will hear it.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
According to TFS, I've been living under a rock. Or, perhaps, not everyone spends the entire day browsing Facebook and Buzzfeed.
Sorry for it being a crapbook video link :(
https://www.facebook.com/phros...
Or maybe I just do not care about these things. Like at all. No, not even a bit.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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?
J
Ah, so *that* is what it was about...
Maybe if you have some horrible laptop with no base and crackly highs you might hear Yanny.
No! It's Gold! No, white.... doh!
I heard Yanny and Laurel, but after a while I heard Jelly.
One hears two distinct voices. One Says "Laurel", one says "Yanny". Why does everybody argue?
This country is fucked. It's YARY!
Okay, I know that you like to watch sattelite falling into the ocean from very close, but maybe you should start mooring your observering barge a little bit further away from Point Nemo.
I'm sure it's going to solve your speakers problem.
Just saying.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nonetheless I don't spend time in this foolish stuff. Just slashdot.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
For Yanni's new album, "Laurel."
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
The "internet" is stupid.
What's next, an optical illusion that looks like a vase, no, wait, it looks like two faces, no wait, it looks like a vase...
Given it's received national media coverage in multiple countries, not hearing about it means you've failed to keep track of current affairs.
Which is fine, that's a personal choice. It does though suggest you're in no fucking position at all to be mocking people that do.
By using the simple built-in sound effects of the sound card, I can get it to drop the "L" sound, so it becomes "yerry". It works by simply downshifting pitch by -4. But the pink noise from the "r" doesn't disappear under any effects that I tried adding. There is about 20 different environmental effects and 15 different equalizer effects. None give me "yanny" -- only "yerry". If I shift the pitch up by +4, then it's always "laurel".
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
You stop hearing higher frequencies with age. Presumably, some people can also be genetically predisposed to hear higher or lower frequencies better. If you shift the pitch in one direction or the other you can get both groups to hear "laurel" or "yerry".
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
And then I get people insist they can tell the difference between high-encoding-bitrate MP3s and raw audio.
Stupid social media controversy is stupid. "Do you hear yanny or laurel ?" my answer : "it is blue and gold" ;).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
His comment is more a general comment about the inanity of those stupid controversy. People just discovering the mystery of audio compression BFD - yay ! One can care & comment on the inanity *in general* of such non-troversy, without being interrested into that particular yanny/laurel one.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Tell me about it. "Unless you've been living under a rock" gets used in horrible contexts similarily to "common sense". "My political view, which half the population disagrees with, is just common sense"
In this case, hearing about an odd audio file is something society is near universally aware of (which is what "unless you've been living under a rock..." is supposed to imply)? Some how I really doubt that.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
The most amusing thing I've seen about this was actually a picture of some loose cursive text that could be read as either Yanny or Laurel.
...the clip that you most likely heard has accentuated higher frequencies due to imperfections in the audio that were created by data compression.
Basically, the clip was manipulated.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
The only way you would've heard "yanny" is if you have no idea what shitty audio compression sounds like. You can use this thing and slide it all the way over to "yanny" and if you're familiar with this sort of thing it still sounds like "laurel" with awful compression.
Given it's received national media coverage in multiple countries, not hearing about it means you've failed to keep track of current affairs.
Well if it's mentioned in passing on the web site of the Daily Express in England and Scotland, I suppose that's technically "national media coverage in multiple countries".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Unless you've been living under a rock for the past few days
FTFY
Addicted to social media
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I don't think I'd agree that this phenomenon "reveals flaws in how we listen to audio". "Flaw" is the wrong word. It's more that this reveals that "listening" is not an objective process, to people who didn't already know that.
When you hear things, you are never hearing a sound that exists in the world. There are "sound waves", i.e. vibrations in air, that exist in the world, but your perception of a sound is not a perfect, immediate, or objective experience of those vibrations. The vibrations hit your body and the various components of your ears, and the structure of those organs respond to certain qualities of the vibration. If the structure is different, the response is different. Then that response triggers an effect in your nervous system, which gets fed to the brain. The brain then filters and interprets those effects, and converts it to basic auditory perception. Then still other parts of your brain try to interpret that perception for meaning.
So it's not quite that there are sounds in the world that we hear, more or less as they are. It's more like, there are things happening in the world that hit our ears, and we create the sounds in our brain.
To put it into computer terms (which aren't a perfect analog), think about Siri (or other phone assistants). it's not like there are WAV files floating around in the air, and the mic on your phone just downloads the WAV file out of the air and stores it on the hard drive with perfect fidelity, and then Siri just understands what you're saying because the language is embedded in the WAV file. No, the design of the microphone will only pick up certain frequencies and volumes of sound, and it was designed specifically to pick up speech. The input from the mic is then converted into digital electrical signals, which are already different from the actual sound in the world. The computer then puts it through some filters to clean the audio up and remove noise, and algorithms are used to identify features and quality of the sound, looking for specific patterns that might be speech. Information about those patterns are then processed and sent to an AI that tries to interpret those patterns into words, and then in turn interpret an intended meaning from the words.
And in this example, even by the time you pass information to the AI, that information is so processed that, if you could just "play it back" as audio, it wouldn't sound like what the mic picked up. In a similar way, what things "sound like" to us is not a precise representation of the reality of sound waves.
And before someone jumps in with a technical objection, like, "Actually, Siri doesn't use the sort of pre-processing that you're describing," I don't care. It's a metaphor, and not intended to be a entire and correct scientific explanation of what's going on.
I have no idea why the summary/article calls the slider "pitch shifting":
Pitch shifting the audio clip up seems to accentuate "laurel" whereas shifting it down accentuates "yanny."
It's EQ shifting. Sliding to the left is a low-pass filter, while sliding to the right is a high-pass filter.
Neither choice was correct. The dress was black and blue, but with an orange color cast due to it being taken with outdoor white balance and overexposed. Objective reality is Laurel and blue/black. Yanny or white/gold is a signal vs. noise.
What's next, an optical illusion that looks like a vase, no, wait, it looks like two faces, no wait, it looks like a vase...
Well we all know that one and it was a well understood phenomenon. This on the other hand..., please show me a long history of materials going back through the ages of how these two words can be misheard.
It's not a recording at all. It just illustrates the imperfection of speech synthesis.
Yeah, that barely known regional publication the New York Times gets read by nobody at all. Much like this niche website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/w...
so yes I live under it and enjoy it.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
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)
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
And than there are those of us (like me) who have largely lost the ability to hear certain frequencies, over the years. From my childhood and into at least my teen years, I could hear a constant high-pitched whistle emitting from any CRT screen from the very second it was flipped on, and until it was powered down again. Loud and clear. From another room. Across the entire damned house. It was actually quite annoying... but I'm pretty sure my parents didn't entirely believe me, because, well, they couldn't hear it. Fast forward to today, and I have to move over to within inches of an old television to hear that same noise. (But, like the skeleton, "I remember...")
So really, I view this "Yanny/Laurel" thing as just a slight variation on the old Mosquito noise trick based on that same premise, that teens sometimes used as adult-proof ringtones and adults sometimes use to drive away annoying kids. Kind'a makes me wonder how long it'll be before people start making even more sophisticated "Mosquito" messages, which say one thing to adults and something else entirely to kids... High pitched poop jokes, maybe? Directives to get-off-my-lawn?
Yes-siree, the future sure is bright...
Apparently you're right, but at 128kbps even on the site it sounds so mechanical and fake:
Yes, by an opera singer! We've collaborated with New-York based opera singers to pronounce every word in our dictionary.
https://www.vocabulary.com/dic...
What else would we listen to?
Instead, I quite distinctly heard "YALLERL".
Venezuela / Minnesota
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
...at the same time.
We need to get used to this kind of disappointment.
Bob Stein, http://bobste.in
The tease indicates that this is a flaw, and I tuned in to see how is this is a flaw. Sounds to me like one of those random evolutionary differences that make one person hear the tiger when someone else only hears the wind.
That's what I heard.
"...we have a resonant chest cavity which creates lower frequencies, and the throat and mouth which creates higher frequencies." This description is simply wrong. The fundamental frequency comes from the vocal cords (for voiced sounds, like vowels, nasal consonants, and the /l/ and /r/, as well as /v/ and /z/ and some other sounds); the chest does not contribute to this frequency. The mouth (and some other parts of the vocal track) filters (or emphasizes) harmonics of the fundamental frequency. Read all about it in the Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
"The word "laurel" contains a combination of both". As does virtually any other word. (Sounds like "pst!" don't have any "voiced" sounds, hence no fundamental frequency; whispered speech also lacks a fundamental frequency. A few languages also have some ordinary words that lack voiced sounds.)