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

Posted by BeauHD on from the behind-the-scenes dept.

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."

22 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. ProZD hears the truth. by Bonker · · Score: 5, Informative

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

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    The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
  2. I listened to it backward by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 4, Funny

    And I heard “Turn me on, dead man” - but my wife swore she heard “Number nine”.

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    #DeleteChrome
    1. Re:I listened to it backward by mentil · · Score: 5, Funny

      All I can hear is "ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn". Might be a resonance effect due to my speakers being pentacle-shaped. Or I just haven't cleaned out enough of the blood that oozes out of them periodically...

      --
      Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
  3. Another example by Knightman · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

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

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    --- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
    1. Re:Another example by Mister+Transistor · · Score: 4, Informative

      I noticed that "hysteresis" effect, too. When you start at one end or the other, your brain locks onto one or the other sound and you keep recognizing that word past the "critical point" on the slider you lost it at in the other direction. Once you become accustomed to hearing one or the other you get biased to keep hearing it despite it trending in the other direction.

      That happened to me accidentally the other day, it was on some TV show I wasn't really paying attention to, and for the first time I heard "Laurel" distinctly, then my brain shifted to hearing "Yanny" and I rewound the DVR and all I could hear on replays was "Yanny".

      This is sort of similar to the optical illusion of the staircase that can be going up or down until you "flip" it by seeing it going the other way, or the 2 faces/vase silhouettes illusion, or the inside-out face, they all make your brain "click" or "flip" from one interpretation of the image to the other.

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      -- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
    2. Re:Another example by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      It is not really any of them. Both of the samples are so filled with noise that they leave your brain to fill in a LOT.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    3. Re:Another example by Mandrel · · Score: 2

      This gestalt flipping is due to the associative networks in the speech recognition section of your temporal cerebral cortex settling into two different low-energy states created by your fluency in English, one a word, and the other a word-like name.

      And the adaptation to each word is probably due to the short-tern strengthening of synapses between active neurons, widening and deepening the energy well for the recently-heard word.

      By moving the slider slowly enough, I can move the switch-over from close to one end to close to the other.

    4. Re:Another example by igot4eyes · · Score: 2

      Me too, it kept changing! Probably didn't help that I already knew what to listen out for as this story is EVERYWHERE

  4. It's official: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    According to TFS, I've been living under a rock. Or, perhaps, not everyone spends the entire day browsing Facebook and Buzzfeed.

    1. Re:It's official: by MaryannG · · Score: 2

      One of the few occasions I'm glad my rock sometimes has sporadic access to the intarwebz.

      --
      Social Media Handywoman at Texas Boys Balloo
  5. I have been living under that rock by gweihir · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re: I have been living under that rock by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yet you cared enough to comment and criticize.

    2. Re: I have been living under that rock by 14erCleaner · · Score: 2

      Do people still brag about not watching TV, or is that irrelevant now that everybody has a smart phone?

      --
      Have you read my blog lately?
  6. Anybody hear "Yarry"? by jtgd · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

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    J
  7. If you have good speakers it's always Laurel. by Cafe+Alpha · · Score: 4, Informative

    Maybe if you have some horrible laptop with no base and crackly highs you might hear Yanny.

    1. Re:If you have good speakers it's always Laurel. by jittles · · Score: 2

      Maybe if you have some horrible laptop with no base and crackly highs you might hear Yanny.

      I honestly thought that it was a trick the first time I listened. I had my device on cellulary service and, with pretty decent headphones heard “Yanny”. A few minutes later I was inside and on Wi-FI (with a different IP address, obviously), and it was so clearly Laurel I thought it was a completely different clip. So now I wonder if perhaps there was some issue with my cellular provider recompressing the audio or something. I have no idea.

  8. Both and neither by reboot246 · · Score: 3, Funny

    I heard Yanny and Laurel, but after a while I heard Jelly.

  9. I don't live under a rock by aglider · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
  10. Clever marketing by GungaDan · · Score: 2

    For Yanni's new album, "Laurel."

    --
    Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
  11. Wow! The "internet" is buzzing about it! by mark_reh · · Score: 2

    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...

  12. Best tested with no prior knowledge of the test by thegreatbob · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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)

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    There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
  13. Imperfect speakers? I have imperfect ears! by zarmanto · · Score: 2

    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...