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A Linguist Explains Why 'Laurel' Sounds Like 'Yanny'
- Kaibeezy 8y agoThere seems to be a lot of discussion and effort around a method to allow people who hear it one way to hear it the other: pitch shifting, change volume, different speakers, etc. I found a simple one, that worked with a basic laptop speaker and middle-aged ears. If you hear "Yanny", put your hands over your ears. The tighter your hold them down, the more high frequencies are filtered out and you will hear "Laurel". You can modulate that to hear both. Might work the other way too. Cup your hands and aim them at the speakers so you get more high frequency. Someone give it a try, eh?
- dwringer 8y agoI agree that muting or muffling allows the presumably original recording (of "Laurel") to come through better. I was hearing a nasally high-pitched "yanny" with a very faint low frequency monotone "laurel" until I heard it on a smaller speaker from across the room, when it was suddenly a normal speaking voice saying "Laurel". Surprised there wasn't more discussion here about it that I could find. Seems like this was possibly found in a study of adversarial examples for audio codecs/speech processing systems?
- comex 8y agoNope, it's just a crappy recording: https://www.wired.com/story/yanny-and-laurel-true-history https://www.wired.com/story/yanny-and-laurel-true-history
- pcunite 8y agoWhat I find just as interesting is how this "went viral". Nearly every publication has a story on it. How did they all decide to publish - at nearly the same time? There has been no lead up here, just instantaneous.
- maxerickson 8y agoI think it pretty much comes down to social media. All the people that are publishing initially saw it at about the same time and it seemed like something that would get the clicks.
- jccalhoun 8y agoslow news day
- Jaruzel 8y agoIn the same way a 'just released' book is instantly #1 in the bestseller lists, and 'just released' music tops the charts almost immediately - paid promotion. Almost all 'viral sensations' from 'influencers' have teams of paid promoters behind them to get what they post in front of as many eyeballs as possible, as quickly as possible. Top Tier Social Media 'celebrities' can directly influence the sales of almost anything if they promote or demote it enough, so there's a lot of money and effort moving around in the background to make all that happen. The sad thing is, that in desperation to keep the hip kids clicking or viewing ads on their sites, all the news outlets just lap up this crap on a daily basis. It's a vicious circle.
- danso 8y agoWhy would there be "lead up" for a viral phenomenon?
- pcunite 8y agoApparently, here is the original source. https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/laurel https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/laurel
- imron 8y agoThanks. That's the first recording that allowed me to hear Laurel.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jpindar 8y agoI find that I have to use good headphones to get repeatable results. Otherwise I can hear the same clip differently from one repeat to the next, which is really weird. Using Audacity and my Sennheisers, a notch filter from about 500 to 1000 Hz reliably changes laurel to yanny in the clip that's being shared on Twitter. There is an intermediate setting where I can hear both at once. The original source from https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/laurel https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/laurel stays laurel no matter what I do.
- rimliu 8y agoI first heard this clip on my headphones (some cheap SONY at the office). It was definitely "Laurel". Then while driving home I hear the bit on BBC about this and when it plays over the radio a hear "yanny".
- glandium 8y agoThe original source sounds like it has much better quality than the ambiguous samples I'd heard so far.
- tristanj 8y agoThe NYT has an excellent interactive demo that lets you listen between both "yanny" and "laurel". There is a slider of how much "yanny" and how much "laurel" you want to hear. I was not able to hear the other word until I played around with this demo. Interestingly, after playing with the demo long enough, I could hear both words spoken at the same time. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio-clip-yanny-laurel-debate.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio-...
- smallnamespace 8y agoI had an odd experience where I would get hysteresis that depended on how fast I adjust the slider. Did anyone else get this? E.g. if I start on the 'yanny' side and very slowly move it down, I hear 'yanny' all the way down to the 'laurel' side. If I pause for a few seconds, I finally start hearing 'laurel', and can hear all the way to the other end too. However, moving the slider a bit more breaks the illusion.
- pjrule 8y agoIndeed, I had a similar experience. Perception is strange.
- schoen 8y agoI had a similar experience too, but I'm not positive whether it's based entirely on perception (which is certainly possible) or some kind of bug in the demo. It would be nice to save individual Ogg files at particular points on the continuum and try more of a blind test to see how much influence there is from what we've just heard before. (I guess I could generate those myself easily enough with sox or something...)
- Mysterix 8y agoWhile I was using the slider on my computer, I kept a laurel/yanny video playing on my phone => I think I can confirm there is no bug in the demo.
- walrus01 8y agoanother example of a similar phenomenon: https://www.reddit.com/r/blackmagicfuckery/comments/8jxzee/you_can_hear_brainstorm_or_green_needle_based_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/blackmagicfuckery/comments/8jxzee/y...
- glandium 8y agoI wonder how similar that actually is, because I can't actually hear yanny when I hear laurel if I think yanny, but there I definitely hear whichever i think about.
- casefields 8y agoJesus. My brain is being all messed with today.
- tobr 8y agoThanks for posting, to me that was a much more potent illusion. I can hear whatever combination of brain/green and needle/storm I’m thinking of. It’s interesting how both this and the yanny/laurel example are recordings of low quality speakers. I guess the added harmonics from the distortion in the playback causes the sounds to be more ambiguous than they would otherwise be.
- stdclass 8y agoI can't hear "needle", no matter how much I concentrate on it. The is a clear S in there, also I can clearly hear it's two syllables - where do you guys hear the third?
- dspig 8y agothe timing is different - the S becomes the EE in needle
- KC8ZKF 8y agoI've heard all possible permutations (Laurel, Yanny, neither, and both) depending on the putative source. All on the same machine. Compression and transcoding might be a bigger variable than psycho-acoustics or age.
- jccalhoun 8y agoone of my favorite audio illusions involves a sentence that has been distorted https://soundcloud.com/whyy-the-pulse/an-audio-illusion https://soundcloud.com/whyy-the-pulse/an-audio-illusion
- laurieg 8y agoThat is a striking illusion! Does anyone know how to recreate this illusion with other sentences?
- rxhernandez 8y agoThere must be something wrong with my head. It sounds like a computer distorted sound every single time I hear it (except of course when they announce they are playing the clean version).
- yumraj 8y agoOn the Laptop (Macbook Pro) speakers at the midpoint I consistently hear Yanny. Upon reading a comment below, I decided to try earphones, in which case, my midpoint became Laurel. Update: The weirdest thing is that now on my speakers also, at the midpoint I have become a Laurel person..
- subway 8y agoI'm a touch creeped out. Initially I could only hear Yanny, then I listened to the varied pitches started with -30, and ending on +40. On the first pass, everything through +30 sounded like Yanny, with a distinct shift to Laurel at +40. Walking it backward, I'm no longer able to hear Yanny at all.
- rcthompson 8y agoThe article is wrong (edit: it might be more complicated; see discussion below). The reason you can hear both is because someone took the high frequencies of "yanny" and combined them with the low frequencies of "laurel". If you apply appropriate high-pass and low-pass filters, you will consistently hear yanny and laurel respectively (assuming your speakers/headphones are capable of reproducing all the required frequencies and your ears are capable of hearing them). Essentially, it's the audio equivalent of the Einstein/Monroe illusion [1]. So this audio illusion doesn't imply that yanny sounds like laurel any more than the visual illusion implies that Einstein looks like Marilyn Monroe. It might be incidentally true that yanny and laurel do in fact sound similar (and this may in turn make the illusion more convincing), but you could probably do the same trick with any two words that have similar cadences, no matter how different they sound. [1]: http://www.123opticalillusions.com/pages/albert-einstein-marilyn-monroe.php http://www.123opticalillusions.com/pages/albert-einstein-mar...
- Grue3 8y agoThe audio was derived entirely from a recording of a man saying "laurel" (can be heard here: [1]). There's no recording of him saying "yanny" because it isn't a word. The high frequencies of "laurel" do in fact sound like "yanny". [1] https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/laurel https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/laurel
- rcthompson 8y agoWell, if someone doctored a recording of "laurel" to make it sound like "yanny" and then mixed it back into the original recording of laurel (or did something mathematically equivalent), then maybe both the article and my comment are correct.
- tristanj 8y agoMixing two audio files is contrary to what the people who posted this to instagram & twitter stated they did.
- tristanj 8y ago
- InfiniteBeing 8y agoI initially heard yanny a couple of times and then laurel. Then I was able to switch a few times before laurel won out ever after with a yanny whisper. With the NYT slider I was able to adjust my yanny boundary leftward through some training.
- beaker52 8y agoI hear "Yarry" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- pietroglyph 8y agoIt's strange to think that this going viral might be the widest reaching implication of the entire life of the person who originally posted this. (A story on the origin of this, if you're interested: https://www.wired.com/story/yanny-and-laurel-true-history/ https://www.wired.com/story/yanny-and-laurel-true-history/ )
- cpeterso 8y agoAnother auditory illusion is the Shepard tone, which has overlapping sine waves that sound like the tone is descending or ascending without end. Wikipedia has a sample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
- jpindar 8y agoMyNoise.net also has that, along with some other interesting audio effects. https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/shepardAudioIllusionToneGenerator.php https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/shepardAudioIllusionToneGe...
- fouc 8y agoSo this is the auditory version of blue/yellow dress.
- Kiro 8y agoObviously, yes, since the phenomena is called the new "dress".
- Dylan16807 8y agoI disagree. That was an example of people making different assumptions and being very stubborn. This is actually hitting deep flaws in audio processing and it's exceptionally difficult to see/hear the alternative. You can't just say "oh, the lighting seems like X but might be Y", it can be impossible to hear the sounds that make up the other version.
- danso 8y agoSorry, but the people who see white/gold aren't just being "stubborn". It is difficult for them to see the alternative.
- Dylan16807 8y agoYou're reading bias that isn't there. Both were equally stubborn!
- cema 8y agoI am another one of those cases who hear "laurel" for most of the spectrum and something like "yelly" at the extreme right side. After hearing "yelly" at the rightmost position of the slider I still hear "yelly" as it slides to the left, becoming "laurel" at about one third of the way. After that, as I slide back to the right, I do not hear "yelly" until the rightmost position.