Guy (having sex): Yes, Laurel! Yes, Laurel! Yes, Laurel!
Laurel: Who the hell is Yanny?
Carry on.
I listened to it over and over and all I ever heard sounded like “Eli”.
I’m late to the game, I just listened to it last night, but it was clearly Yanni.
I am pretty sure it does depend on the ability to hear the higher frequencies clearly. While I can’t hear Yanny normally, I did finally hear it when the pitch was lowered enough. The parts that distinguish vowel and consonant sounds are quite high pitched, even though the fundamental isn’t. So, yeah, it’s not going to sound all that high pitched, because the fundamental has to still be in a normal speaking range or it won’t sound like speech at all.
And while it may be noisy, it’s not all that noisy. There’s more noise in my environment with my AC blowing than there is in the clip. And yet I never have this problem in real life. So I do still think this is like those pictures that have been artificially altered, and that the upper harmonics have been altered to resemble other sounds.
And, yes, I do think it was originally “laurel.” Not because that’s what I hear, but because it’s easier to mess with the upper frequencies than the lower ones. And I think actually layering the other on top of it would be too difficult to get it to match up.
I do also notice how people who hear “laurel” hear it clearly, while people hear all sorts of variations on Yanny. And that one is a common word, while the other is at most a name.
I was traveling last week when this story became a thing. I am sitting in my hotel room with the TV on for background noise while I am emailing. The TV catches my attention because I am hearing a robo voice saying “yanny, yanny, yanny”. I am all, WTH?
So I look it up on my laptop and play it and it is “laurel, laurel, laurel”.
I find it interesting I heard Yanny first when I had no pre-concieved notion as to what my choices to hear were.
Maybe it is just the two different kinds of speakers?
I was at the gas station today, mentally composing a Pit thread about gas stations that now have TV networks blaring from their pumps (“GSTV”!), when the pump began bleating “yanni…yanni…yanni…” (or, one supposes, “laurel…laurel…laurel”).
Anyhow, between the time I started this thread and that moment, I decided I want it to be over. The difference between this event and the white-and-gold dress is that you don’t have to look at the damn dress if you don’t want.
Please do! Because that irritates the crapola outta me!
That has to be a lot to do with it: yesterday a TV show I was watching played the White House 45-second “comic” survey of Ivanka, Sarah Sanders, Kellyanne, etc. as to what they heard, as someone played the sound file for them on a cell phone. Despite being a “laurel” hearer on the original and Business Insider pages, I hear “YEAH-nee” throughout the WH video.
Just now I found the WH video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfqZlMCcbdM
And what do you know: I’m hearing “laurel” on my computer, where I heard “yeah-nee” on my TV.
So there’s a string of devices involved in both cases. The sound file played on a cell phone, as recorded by a White House video-camera (I’m guessing) then played on television-studio equipment and broadcast over my TV, sounds like “YEAH-nee.” But the same string of devices that ends with YouTube and my computer (instead of with my TV) makes the file sound like “laurel.”
Funny we both heard “Yanny” on the TV and “Laurel” on the computer.
That would make for an interesting poll (if we could get large numbers of people to view the White House video on a TV and on a computer).
This is “Laurel”.
.
Just like that dress was Black and Blue.
.
YES, some sensor-impaired humans may perceive it as something different, but like the dress color, there is an objective truth.
The dress WAS black and Blue.
This sound IS “Laurel”
Same here. How does anyone hear a “n” sound in that???
ETA: Had not heard about this until this morning, and was listening to NPR as I was driving around. So, if it makes a difference, I heard it on my car sound system. But absolutely nothing that sounded anything even close to “Yanni”.
One other thing. The NPR host was interviewing the guy whose voice it was, and he said in no uncertain terms that he was saying “Laurel”. So how is it that we who hear “Laurel” are the ones not hearing it right?
I guess it’s in the high frequencies. Like I said later in the thread, I managed to get it to sound like “Yanny” to me and it was really uncanny (and rhymed with it.) Truly bizarre stuff, because when I heard it as “yanny” it sounded, clear as day, like “yanny” rhymes with “fanny.” And it made no sense to me how or why I heard “Laurel” before, but I haven’t been able to reproduce the effect since that one time I was walking outside listening to my iPhone. I can’t “will” myself to hear “yanny” like others here can. It was just that one time where I heard “yanny” and I really thought the sound sample were swapped or something for a moment, but they weren’t.
Ah, but the actual colors you see on the screen were objectively blue-ish white and a mustard/gold color, not black. The dress itself may have been black and blue, but those were not the actual colors in the picture, so it’s difficult to say who is “right.” I could make a sheet of white paper look blue in a photo quite easily, and if I ask “what color is the paper?” I would say both answers are correct. When the exposure and color balance are off, it’s difficult to ascertain the original colors.
Well, I listened to it from the link above and clearly heard Yanni. Today I was listening to the radio in my car and NPR did a story about this. It was very distinctly Laurel.
If I put it in neutral, I hear “Laurel”, clear as day. If I slide it all the way to the “Yanni” end, I hear what sounds like “Gary” being spoken by someone with an Israeli accent.
After listening to it a bunch, I can switch back and forth at will.
I liken it to being able to pick a voice out of a crowd. If you are trying to hear your friend at a crowded restaurant, you can filter out the noise and hear just his voice, even if the amount of noise is greater than the voice. There’s a bunch of noise in there, and there is just a bit of signal.
Most of the time, I hear “Laurel” spoken by a male voice, the rest is noise that is filtered out by my brain. But, if before listening, I picture someone younger, and maybe even sneering a bit to get the nasal overtones, I hear “Yanny”, and the parts that are not Yanny get filtered out as noise.
Note the origin of this soundclip:
“One detail may frustrate some and vindicate others: The original clip came from the vocabulary.com page for “laurel,” the word for a wreath worn on the head, “usually a symbol of victory.””
IT
IS
LAUREL
!!
(Which , when played using horridly malfunctioning sound filters / ears / minds / sound equipment, can be distorted to sound like ghjinnaaai ((which some silly people then translate as Yanni)))
Well that’s us told.
In an odd live version of this, I did a concert last week with a baritone soloist I hadn’t worked with before, and in rehearsals several of us noticed that his voice had some very odd overtones that, even across the room, made it sound like there was a second, higher voice singing different vowel sounds simultaneously, much in the way that a low “Laurel” produces a high “Yanni”. At first I thought he was just making something in the room resonate but it happened again in a different venue. Oddly (and perhaps fortunately) it didn’t happen in the actual performance that I was able to hear. Mind you, it’ll be on the radio this week so I’ll have a listen and let you know.
When asked (diplomatically) about his singing style he mentioned letting the sound “resonate in the mask” (that is, the bones of the sinus areas above and below the eyes), which is in itself common practice, but I’ve never heard this effect achieved before and it wasn’t clear whether the singer was aware that he was doing it. And I wasn’t going to tell him…