Laurel or Yanny? What We Heard From the Experts
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/15/science/yanny-laurel.html
Sound waves are the new internet dresses.CreditRuby Washington/The New York Times
By Maya Salam and Daniel Victor
May 15, 2018
Three years ago, the internet melted down over the color 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 clip and an online poll were posted on Instagram, Reddit and other sites by high school students who said that it had been recorded from a vocabulary website playing through the speakers on a computer.
We Made a Tool So You Can Hear Both Yanny and Laurel
How far do you have to move our slider to hear one name or the other?
May 16, 2018
An 18-year-old high school student in Lawrenceville, Ga., Roland Szabo, was the first to post it on Reddit, where it quickly took off. At first, he claimed he had made the audio file himself. But on Thursday Mr. Szabo credited the students identified by Wired as creators of the Instagram post, saying he had been caught up in the media excitement.
[It’s not over yet: Yanny or Laurel? The Trump White House wants to play, too.]
Social media bragging rights aside, the source of the clip may frustrate some and vindicate others: the vocabulary.com page for “laurel,” the word for a wreath worn on the head, “usually a symbol of victory.” Sorry, Team Yanny.
Sharing of the poll 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).
Cloe Feldman
✔
@CloeCouture
What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel
10:39 PM - May 14, 2018
213K
141K people are talking about this
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On Tuesday evening, Ms. Feldman said in a video that 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.”
Yanny vs Laurel... explained.CreditVideo by Cloe Feldman
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.”
View image on Twitter
View image on Twitter
Alex Zalben
✔
@azalben
guys help me out, does this dress say yanny or laurel
4:16 PM - May 15, 2018
4,199
1,243 people are talking about this
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Erika W. Smith
✔
@erikawynn
stop trying to make the dress happen again
4:46 PM - May 15, 2018
35
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[Read more about the dress, which was definitely blue and black — or was it? — here.]
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 U.C.L.A., 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 theorized, online sleuths were hard at work manipulating the bass, pitch or volume
Steve Pomeroy
@xxv
Ok, so if you pitch-shift it you can hear different things:
down 30%: https://xxv.so/0x6841c258
down 20%: https://xxv.so/0x75b636d0
up 20%: https://xxv.so/0x9d0eb907
up 30% https://xxv.so/0x6d752ac8
up 40% https://xxv.so/0x90b8eeee https://twitter.com/CloeCouture/status/ ... 9831473152 …
2:49 PM - May 15, 2018
5,586
3,283 people are talking about this
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Some speculated, like Dr. Keating, that 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.
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The musician Yanni, for his part, said his ears weren’t deceiving him.
Yanni
✔
@Yanni
I only hear Yannihahaha https://twitter.com/cloecouture/status/ ... 9831473152 …
5:55 PM - May 15, 2018
9,319
2,717 people are talking about this
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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.
Correction: May 17, 2018
An earlier version of this article incorrectly credited a high school student with recording the online audio clip. The student who posted it on Reddit had said in an interview that he had recorded it from his computer, but on Thursday he confirmed another student had. The error was repeated in a headline.
Patrick LaForge and Heather Murphy contributed reporting.
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* maybe someone with better skills could post the Yanny player properly?
