'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

ProZD hears the truth.

[Bonker]

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

I listened to it backward

[93 Escort Wagon]

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

Re:I listened to it backward

[mentil]

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...

Another example

[Knightman]

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

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

Re:Another example

[Mister Transistor]

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.

It's official:

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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?

Re: I have been living under that rock

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet you cared enough to comment and criticize.

If you have good speakers it's always Laurel.

[Cafe Alpha]

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