Laurel or Yanny? What we heard from the experts
This audio clip baffled internet users worldwide. Photo: Getty
Three years ago, the internet melted down over the colour of a dress. Now an audio file has friends, family members and office mates questioning one another’s hearing, and their own.
Is the voice saying “Yanny” or “Laurel”?
The sound clip jumped to prominence when Roland Szabo, an 18-year-old high school student in Lawrenceville, Georgia posted it on Reddit.
On Thursday (Wednesday US time), Mr Szabo said he was working some time ago on a school project and recorded the voice from a vocabulary website playing through the speakers on his computer.
People in the room disagreed about what they were hearing. He said a friend of his first posted it on Instagram before he put it on Reddit. But there is some doubt about that story: Wired spoke to two other high school students who claimed they created the clip.
One fact may frustrate some and vindicate others: the primary recording came from the vocabulary.com page for “laurel,” the word for a wreath worn on the head, “usually a symbol of victory.”
Sharing of the clip really took off Tuesday after the tweet below from a self-described YouTube “influencer” named Cloe Feldman, which was featured in too many news articles to count (including an earlier version of the one you are reading).
What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel pic.twitter.com/jvHhCbMc8I
— Cloe Feldman (@CloeCouture) May 15, 2018
On Wednesday (Tuesday US time), Ms Feldman said in a video she was fielding multiple interview requests and searching for the original creator.
“I did not create Yanny vs Laurel.” she said. “I don’t know how this was made.”
It didn’t take long for the auditory illusion to be referred to as “black magic.”
And more than one person online yearned for that simpler time in 2015, when no one could decide whether the mother of the bride wore white and gold or blue and black.
It was a social media frenzy in which internet trends and traffic on the topic spiked so high that Wikipedia itself now has a simple entry, “The dress.”
Am I a NY Times bestselling tweeter now? https://t.co/MLzKchcV4U pic.twitter.com/scPLbjBeGs
— Alex Zalben (@azalben) May 16, 2018
stop trying to make the dress happen again
— Erika W. Smith (@erikawynn) May 15, 2018
Many audio and hearing experts have weighed in.
Jody Kreiman, a principal investigator at the voice perception laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, helpfully guessed that “the acoustic patterns for the utterance are midway between those for the two words”.
“The energy concentrations for Ya are similar to those for La,” she said. “N is similar to r; I is close to l.”
Patricia Keating, a linguistics professor and the director of the phonetics lab at UCLA, said: “It depends on what part [what frequency range] of the signal you attend to.”
“I have no idea why some listeners attend more to the lower frequency range while others attend more to the higher frequency range,” she added. “Age? How much time they spend talking on the phone?”
Elliot Freeman, a perception researcher at City University of London, said our brains can selectively tune into different frequency bands once we know what to listen out for, “like a radio”.
“What one hears first depends on the how the sound is reproduced, e.g. on an iPhone speaker or headphones, and on an individual’s own ‘ear print’ which might determine their sensitivity to different frequencies,” he said.
While the experts theorised, online sleuths were hard at work manipulating the bass, pitch or volume.
Ok, so if you pitch-shift it you can hear different things:
down 30%: https://t.co/F5WCUZQJlq
down 20%: https://t.co/CLhY5tvnC1
up 20%: https://t.co/zAc7HomuCS
up 30% https://t.co/JdNUILOvFW
up 40% https://t.co/8VTkjXo3L1 https://t.co/suSw6AmLtn— Steve Pomeroy and 🤖 others (@xxv) May 15, 2018
Some speculated, like Dr Keating, the differences might be related to hearing loss or the age of the listener. It is known that some sounds are audible only to people under 25.
“If you turn the volume very low, there will be practically no bass and you will hear Yanny,” a Reddit user wrote confidently.
Yet making those adjustments did not change the word for some.
“I literally just turned all frequencies below 1khz to negative 70 decibels and I still hear ‘laurel,'” someone said on Reddit. Others heard different sounds on different equipment, while still others claimed to hear both.
The musician Yanni, for his part, said his ears weren’t deceiving him.
With time, a definitive scientific explanation will probably surface, like the one given for the dress, which had much to do with lighting.
In the meantime, use our handy tool to baffle your friends and astound your enemies, until the next random internet phenomenon has you doubting your own senses.
Patrick LaForge and Heather Murphy contributed reporting.
– New York Times
