Yanny….no…Laurel….no…Yanny….no…Laurel.
I am one of the few people who has heard it both ways and honestly I am so confused!
Which is it supposed to be.
Hello and welcome back to Life’s Biggest Questions, the channel that looks to answer
exactly those.
I am your host, Rebecca Felgate and today I am asking once and for all….Is it Laurel
or Yanny?
There actually is an answer here!
Okay, I am about to take a listen right now and tell you what I hear today.
So….right now it sounds like ** to me.
What do you hear.
On the 16th May 2018 the internet was divided once again.
In this seasons, The Dress, people were confronted with an audio recording and it turns out that
people either hear Laurel or Yanny.
How can this be?
The two words at face value sound so different?
As the original audio recording sky rocketed to over 20 million listens in a day, people
were tweeting out whether they were team Laurel or Team Yanny…but it turns out, the internet
couldn’t be divided into just two teams…depending on what time of day it was, the environment
people were listening in, and most importantly at what frequency they heard the recording.
So I have been able to hear it both ways!
I first heard Yanny, then Laurel, then Yanny…then Laurel… and it turns out that it isn’t
a simple heads or tales answer.
Whether or not you hear Laurel or Yanny depends on what frequencies your brain is picking
out.
It also has to do with the poor quality recording of the original audio clip and the frequency
ranges of the headphones or speakers you are listening to the clip in.
So, let’s talk about the original recording.
As we mentioned, it is a bad recording.
Brad Story, professor of Speech, language, hearing and sciences at the University of
Arizona said: The low quality recording creates enough ambiguity in the acoustic feature that
some listeners may be led toward the 'yanny' perception.
With a high-quality recording, and if all listeners were listening with the same device,
there may not be any confusion.
But why, if we are all listening to the same original low quality recording, do some of
us hear different things?
Well it depends on what frequencies our ears can pick up.
Older people tend to be able to mainly hear lower frequencies, but younger people are
still able to hear high frequencies.
A bit of a generalisation, but older people are more likely to hear Laurel, and younger,
likely to hear Yanny.
But of course, a lot of people of all ages have heard the recording both ways.
It is also a psychological phenomenon – the way we hear things is influenced by your subconscious
brain.
As the original recording is terrible, our brains fill on some of the gaps with what
it thinks it ought to be hearing.
On top of that, the way we hear sound is totally dependent on our recent experiences with it.
If you were just listening to something basey, it can reduce your base sensitivity making
you more sensitive to higher frequencies.
This temporarily shifts the goal posts of your hearing…the same goes for listening
to high pitched sounds, after that, you ears may be more sensitive to lower pitches, which
explains why some people might hear Laurel one minute, then Yanny the next.
I for one am happy there is a scientific explanation, as prior to that I was just going to straight
up say it was some kind of voodoo magic.
Also….quick note – drinking alcohol can also affect the way you hear things, too.
While a lot of people have heard it both ways, some have yet to switch camp.
Interestingly, though….
The New York Times developed a tool that allows for the listener to hear both Laurel and Yanny
by sliding up and down a frequency scale.
Here, theoretically, everyone should be able to hear both, at whatever frequency it takes.
Once again, it all goes back to that terrible audio recording.
If you look at a spectrogram of the original recording, you can see that the recording
contains both high and low frequencies.
The way the New York Times Slider works is by cutting out the low frequencies on one
end, and the high on the other.
Audio analysis across the internet have recorded themselves saying both Laurel and Yanny and
surprisingly, both words have similar primary acoustic features – high, low, high.
At first these two words might not seem similar, but they are.
So…what is it, Laurel or Yanny.
Here comes the answer.
It is Laurel.
This whole debate started when Freshman student, Katie Hetzel from Flowery Branch High School
in Georgia looked up the pronunciation of Laurel on Vocabulary.com.
The only thing is, when she played the terrible quality recording, she heard Yanny.
As we know, depending on what frequency our brains are trained to hear at, both can be
heard in the poor quality recording.
This is where it began.
She asked her class mates what they thought and they all reported mixed things.
She then posted it on her Instagram story.
A senior at the school, Fernando Castro republished it on his story and ran a poll….then a friend
of his put it on ready.
And that my friends, is how a viral debate is born!
It was then picked up by Youtuber Cloe Feldman who has over 200 thousand followers on twitter,
and the rest, as they say is history.
I am going to listen one more time and see if it has changed for me over the course of
this video.
Right.
So…is it Laurel or Yanny?
It is Laurel, but nobody can blame you for hearing Yanny, because it is kinda hidden
in the audioclip.
I think the main thing to takeaway here isn’t the answer, but the amazing phenomenon that
is psychoacoustics.
Our brains are incredible things, and it goes to show that people don’t always hear or
think in the same way, but given a little patience and understanding, it is possible
to hear each other out.
So that is one question answered for you!
What did you hear?
Laurel, yanny or both?
Let me know in the comments section down below.
Also, do hit that thumbs up button if you like our content!
I am your host Rebecca Felgate, I’ll catch you in the next video, but for now…stay
curious, stay alert and never ever stop questioning.