# Laurel or Yanny **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [May 15, 2018, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250 "2018-05-15T23:29:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Quimby](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/22d042/32.png) [@Quimby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quimby)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2018, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/81 "2018-05-16T23:06:36Z")
Strangely, when they played the sound on the radio today (and they swore it was the original sound from the original Reddit link) I heard Laurel. I don’t know what to think anymore. ---
**Author:** ![bobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobot/32/21622_2.png) [@bobot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bobot)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2018, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/82 "2018-05-16T23:15:05Z")
I heard Yanny, like Annie. I was blown away when the news show tonight separated the higher and lower frequency versions of this. The lower frequency version was clearly Laurel, but I didn’t hear that without some filtering. My ears constantly ring a high pitch, if that has anything to do with this. ---
**Author:** ![Aspidistra](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aspidistra/32/3894_2.png) [@Aspidistra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aspidistra)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2018, 11:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/83 "2018-05-16T23:33:44Z")
The original on the dictionary page is very obviously Laurel to this Yanni-hearer’s ears. So the audio must have been garbled in some way, during the various iterations of posting and reposting it went through on the way to becoming a viral star. Possibly the Yanni is an artefact of some compression algorithm, that just happened to sound like speech Interestingly, when I checked out the interactive Laurel-Yanni slider on the NYT page, I started with Yanni, as usual, and had to push it left as far as mark 2 to finally hear Laurel … but _having heard it_ I can now push the slider back to 5 and hear it clearly as an undertone - and even push the slider as far as about mark 7 before the Laurel fades into background-Yanniness. This kind of shit is why I never ever wanted to make a living doing audio-_anything_ ---
**Author:** ![Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/qadgop_the_mercotan/32/83_2.png) [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qadgop_the_Mercotan)\ **Post date:** [May 16, 2018, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/84 "2018-05-16T23:48:08Z")
I hear Laurel. Very distinctly. The Mrs. hears Yanny. Vehemently so. I studied perception and cognition in some depth back in the day, and have kept up with the topic to some extent, so I can accept quite easily the underlying concepts which explain the phenomenon. ---
**Author:** ![PatriotGrrrl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/9dc877/32.png) [@PatriotGrrrl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatriotGrrrl)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/85 "2018-05-17T00:08:37Z")
Using phone or laptop speakers, my results were inconclusive. Sometimes I even hear the words alternating (and I don’t mean I’m hearing something in between, I mean two very different words alternating). But with my good Sennheiser headphones, it’s laurel - until I use an equalizer to add a notch filter from about 600 Hz to 1000 Hz. That turns it into yanny. If the notch is shallow, like only -6dB, I can hear both at once. That’s with the audio clip that’s going around on social media. The original clip from the dictionary page stays laurel. ---
**Author:** ![Doubticus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e56c9b/32.png) [@Doubticus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doubticus)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/86 "2018-05-17T00:08:41Z")
I heard “Laurel”, after adjusting the bass and treble I still heard “Laurel”. ---
**Author:** ![Ravenman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ravenman/32/2929_2.png) [@Ravenman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ravenman)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/87 "2018-05-17T00:10:54Z")
> [@MonkeyMensch](#): > > I"m pretty much a ditto of what **RavenMan** experienced up on post #17: I heard 3 or 4 "Yanny"s and then nothing but “Laurels” since and it isn’t going back. I guess I’m just resting on my laurels. I have listened to it like four more times today. Half yanny, half laurel. ---
**Author:** ![naita](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naita/32/5862_2.png) [@naita](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/naita)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/88 "2018-05-17T00:36:56Z")
> [@Qadgop\_the\_Mercotan](#): > > I hear Laurel. Very distinctly. > > The Mrs. hears Yanny. Vehemently so. > > I studied perception and cognition in some depth back in the day, and have kept up with the topic to some extent, so I can accept quite easily the underlying concepts which explain the phenomenon. I too live in a house divided. My spouse hears Yanni. With the speeded up and slowed down versions linked from the The Atlantic article we agree, but with the “original” … ---
**Author:** ![Sherrerd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sherrerd/32/8_2.png) [@Sherrerd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sherrerd)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 12:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/89 "2018-05-17T00:48:16Z")
I heard “Laurel” from the link on the Business Insider page. In the second video, in which someone plays with the pitch, I heard “YEAH-nee” (though the video’s host repeatedly said he heard “YAW-nee”) where the pitch was lowered. In re auditory illusions: the movie _Dunkirk_ recently came to cable, and the Wikipedia page on it mentions that Hans Zimmer deliberately incorporated some illusions into his score for the film. An interesting discussion–with clips–is at [Auditory illusion - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_illusion) ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/90 "2018-05-17T01:02:04Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > I hear nothing but “Laurel” there. I can’t even get my ears to hear “Yanny.” Whoa. I finally got to hear “Yanny” by playing the sample on the phone and putting the speaker right up against my ear. Then it sounded exactly like “yanny,” rhymes with “Annie,” and I can’t hear any way to get “Laurel” out of it. When I move it about a centimeter or two away from my ear, it starts to blend, and then at anywhere more than a few centimeters, it snaps back into “Laurel.” > [@Aspidistra](#): > > The original on the dictionary page is very obviously Laurel to this Yanni-hearer’s ears. So the audio must have been garbled in some way, during the various iterations of posting and reposting it went through on the way to becoming a viral star. Possibly the Yanni is an artefact of some compression algorithm, that just happened to sound like speech The effect works for me on the [vocabulary.com](http://vocabulary.com) page just fine, so it’s not a compression artifact, at least for this listener. This is trippy as hell. ---
**Author:** ![monstro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba9def/32.png) [@monstro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/monstro)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 1:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/91 "2018-05-17T01:07:41Z")
I only hear laurel. I’ve been listening to that clip all day long and never once have I heard “Yanny”. Even when I moved the slider in **Telemark’s** link all the way to the “Yanny” side, I didn’t hear it (I just hear a very distorted “laurel”). ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 1:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/92 "2018-05-17T01:15:57Z")
The first session I heard it, i heard Yanny (rhyming with “fanny”), and upon replying it kept beginning with “Y” but the other vowels and consonants kept changing. The second session I heard it, I heard “laurel” straight away, and then it kept alternating in that session between “Yaurel” and back to “Laurel” and then “yaurel” again. ---
**Author:** ![Aspidistra](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aspidistra/32/3894_2.png) [@Aspidistra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aspidistra)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/93 "2018-05-17T01:23:06Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > The effect works for me on the [vocabulary.com](http://vocabulary.com) page just fine, so it’s not a compression artifact, at least for this listener. > > This is trippy as hell. Whoooa - freaky! does the [vocabulary.com](http://vocabulary.com) page actually _sound different_ to you though? Just for clarity- I’m getting the Yanny/Laurel freak version from [business insider](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/yanny-or-laurel-recording-causes-arguments-2018-5?r=US&IR=T) and [vocabulary.com](http://vocabulary.com) [here](https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/laurel) They sound wildly different to me. [Vocabulary.com](http://Vocabulary.com) link is much louder, for starters, and has no hint of ‘yanny’ in it. Is it possible the [vocabulary.com](http://vocabulary.com) page is playing a different codec to me, than to people on other devices? ---
**Author:** ![betterlifethroughchemistry](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/betterlifethroughchemistry/32/3094_2.png) [@betterlifethroughchemistry](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/betterlifethroughchemistry)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 1:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/94 "2018-05-17T01:34:02Z")
Yanny, although my youngest son hears ‘Yammy’…Mrs. BLTC only hears ‘Laurel’…and the dress was blue and black, although, once again, Mrs. BLTC reports a white and gold dress… ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 2:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/95 "2018-05-17T02:51:12Z")
> [@Aspidistra](#): > > Whoooa - freaky! > > does the [vocabulary.com](http://vocabulary.com) page actually _sound different_ to you though? > > Just for clarity- I’m getting the Yanny/Laurel freak version from [business insider](https://www.businessinsider.com.au/yanny-or-laurel-recording-causes-arguments-2018-5?r=US&IR=T) and [vocabulary.com](http://vocabulary.com) [here](https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/laurel) > > They sound wildly different to me. [Vocabulary.com](http://Vocabulary.com) link is much louder, for starters, and has no hint of ‘yanny’ in it. > > Is it possible the [vocabulary.com](http://vocabulary.com) page is playing a different codec to me, than to people on other devices? It’s the same voice, but, yes, the [vocabulary.com](http://vocabulary.com) version is cleaner. And the viral version is obviously a recording of somebody playing the [vocabulary.com](http://vocabulary.com) sample on the computer, because you can hear a little bit of ambient noise as well as somebody hitting a space bar or other key on a computer keyboard. But I heard the “yanny” and “laurel” pronunciations on both clips. The weird thing is, I can’t get either of them to sound like “Yanny” anymore. It’s just “Laurel.” I was outside walking the dog, and there was a lot of street noise going on, and that’s when I heard it, plain as day, as “yanny” in both clips, but now, inside a quiet house, it’s back to “laurel” again. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/96 "2018-05-17T02:54:35Z")
As I say, I can hear whichever I want to hear now. There’s no particular trick to it though; now I know exactly how both are supposed to sound (I mean perceptually), it’s easy to superimpose that on to my expectation of what I’m about to hear. But note that if I hear “Yanny” I can also hear a dull ringing at the end, which seems like background noise but is actually the “-el” of Laurel. And if I hear “Laurel” the background noise seems like it’s throughout the whole thing (though faint) and is something of a wheezing, high-pitched noise ---
**Author:** ![Aspidistra](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aspidistra/32/3894_2.png) [@Aspidistra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aspidistra)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 3:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/97 "2018-05-17T03:05:40Z")
I went and played the [vocabulary.com](http://vocabulary.com) one on all the devices in my house, just to see if I could hear ‘yanniness’ in it. And if I play it on the phone, or out of little cheap headphones I can hear a hint of it - a kind of tinny sound over the top of the ‘laurel’ that could be a ‘y’ and an ‘ee’ in a high register. But on the vocabulary version ‘laurel’ overwhelms everything. the ‘laurel’ frequencies seem to have been toned right down in the viral version ---
**Author:** ![Walken\_After\_Midnight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/b487fb/32.png) [@Walken\_After\_Midnight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walken_After_Midnight)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 3:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/98 "2018-05-17T03:27:26Z")
> [@MonkeyMensch](#): > > I"m pretty much a ditto of what **RavenMan** experienced up on post #17: I heard 3 or 4 "Yanny"s and then nothing but “Laurels” since and it isn’t going back. Same happened to me. Now, using the slider, going left to right, I hear Laurel until 9/10, but going back the other way I hear Yanni until 6/10, so three notches in difference. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 3:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/99 "2018-05-17T03:57:51Z")
> [@Jacquernagy](#): > > This is an auditory illusion, but unlike most illusions, there IS in fact a correct answer. He’s saying “Laurel”, in a deep bass voice, like that which a newscaster might use. The low frequency, a bit like a frog’s croak, can fool your ears into thinking it’s hearing something in a high-pitched scratchy voice, but if you listen intently for the inflection of “Laurel”, you will hear it and you will not be able to hear “Yanny” again. No, I can’t. Absolutely cannot perceive “laurel” in that sound at all, not a hint of it. I can if I use the NYT thing and turn it all the way to Laurel, but the “original” sound, no. ---
**Author:** ![Aspidistra](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aspidistra/32/3894_2.png) [@Aspidistra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aspidistra)\ **Post date:** [May 17, 2018, 4:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250/100 "2018-05-17T04:27:56Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > No, I can’t. Absolutely cannot perceive “laurel” in that sound at all, not a hint of it. I can if I use the NYT thing and turn it all the way to Laurel, but the “original” sound, no. What do you hear in the [really original](https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/laurel) one, just out of interest? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/laurel-or-yanny/814250.md?page=6)