Click here to Listen to audio clip
If you have been online or on social media in the past few days, everybody is talking about this new audio illusion. What happens when you here the audio? Chances are you hear one of two things, either Yanny or Laurel. Thing is, you're both correct!
What's the illusion?
So how does this happen? Well put simply it's an illusion; created by how our bodies hear and process sound. The sound byte was created from the vocabulary.com website; which pronounces words that you look up. While there is some debate about who the original creator of the clip is; we do know that it was a high school student in Georgia, who came across the clip while doing homework, and posted it online. This sparked massive interest as people were hearing two different things.
According to Tyler Pershawn, a neuroscientist at Boston University; because the distortion on the audio clip some people pick up the higher frequencies and hear Yanny, while others who hear the lower frequencies better will hear Laurel. In fact, 53% of people polled heard Laurel instead on Yanny. However some people (myself included) hear both at different times. For instance, when I hear the clip just in passing, I hear Yanny; but if I sit and listen, I hear Laurel. This is just previous conditioning and our mind playing tricks on us. Listen again and tell me what you hear?
Watch Tyler explain in this interview he gave, in this video. He explains that the method in which you hear the clip, will change what you hear. If you have a headset that really picks up the high frequencies, you are going to hear Yanni vs Laurel. While it hasn't been proven whether the original clip was edited, it makes sense that the recording would have captured more of the lower frequencies as most microphones filter out the higher end frequencies for clarity.
So What is Really Being Said?
Well if you go by sound alone we'd be here all day debating this. However several articles from ABC, CBS, and the New York Times have all covered this story; and they say that the originally word is in fact Laurel. I went to Vocabulary.com to check it out for myself; and while you can clearly hear the word on my computer, I took a recording on my phone and tried this test myself. Not surprising, I got similar results, some heard Yanny some heard the correct word.
Conclusion
So there you have it; the great internet debate of 2018 hs been solved and put to rest. Sorry to all those who were on team Yanny; it may be time to get better headphones to listen to your music with. After going through all the data and talking to others about this phenomenon; I started to wonder, how many of my favorite songs am I hearing correctly. What if some of my favorite lyrics aren't what I think they are? What if John Lennon didn't want me to imagine, or maybe it wasn't 'smoke' that was on the water... nah! That's just crazy... right?