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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I heard “Laurel”, after adjusting the bass and treble I still heard “Laurel”.
I have listened to it like four more times today. Half yanny, half laurel.
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” …
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
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.”
The effect works for me on the vocabulary.com page just fine, so it’s not a compression artifact, at least for this listener.
This is trippy as hell.
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”).
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.
Whoooa - freaky!
does the vocabulary.com page actually sound different to you though?
Just for clarity- I’m getting the Yanny/Laurel freak version from business insider and vocabulary.com here
They sound wildly different to me. Vocabulary.com link is much louder, for starters, and has no hint of ‘yanny’ in it.
Is it possible the vocabulary.com page is playing a different codec to me, than to people on other devices?
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…
It’s the same voice, but, yes, the vocabulary.com version is cleaner. And the viral version is obviously a recording of somebody playing the 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.
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
I went and played the 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
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.
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 one, just out of interest?