'Yanny' or 'Laurel': Audio Experts Weigh In on the Raging Debate That Has Gone Viral
Those who can still remember the dress debate of 2015 are probably already familiar with this one. In a question that have gone past viral, an audio recording that sounds like "Yanny" or "Laurel," depending on who's listening, is about to get settled.
For those who haven't heard about it, this all started with a video posted on Twitter where user Cloe Feldman asked her followers what they can pick up from this recorded digitized voice.
That's where the dispute started. Some listeners would claim to hear "Yanny," while others would insist that its "Laurel" before making recommendations to their friends to see a hearing specialist.
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It's a debate that has threatened to take over the Internet, as celebrities like Katy Perry pitched in — in her case, she clearly heard "Laurel." As for Ellen DeGeneres, she's on the "Laurel" side of the debate as well, albeit at the cost of interrupting her show for a few minutes.
Perhaps like the dress debate of 2015, there's a right answer for this one as well. Popular Science called for Brad Story, a professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences at the University of Arizona, to do his expert analysis of the audio's waveform to settle things once and for all.
There's a lot of speech sciences devoted to solving this puzzle, but to sum things up, Story pointed out that the waveform is typical of someone saying the "L" and "R" sounds, which more or less conclusively rules "Yanny" out for him.
Why do some listeners hear "Yanny" when they listen to this recording, then? An explanation, offered by The Verge after they did some experimenting on their own, has to do with the frequency the audio is played at.
It's the same digitized voice, but people will be hearing it played out over very different audio devices. Some would be hearing it through a home theater setup while others would be using tinny mobile home speakers. Even different models of headphones will give different emphasis to the bass and upper frequencies of the recording.
There's also the matter of age, where older adults tend to lose some of their higher frequency hearing with age.
For those who have some audio software with them, they can try it out for themselves. Playing the voice with all the lower frequencies dialed down will make it sound like "Yanny" pretty much all the time for everyone.
The opposite holds true, where cutting off the higher frequencies make it definitely sound like "Laurel." Then again, the audio sample itself has enough room for both possibilities, according to Bharath Chandrasekaran, a communications sciences professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
"It's a little bit noisy, so that itself causes perception to be a little more ambiguous," he explained. "Because it's noisy, your brain is filling in with what it thinks it should be," the professor added.
