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If you play this clip, chances are you have a pretty clear idea of which sound it is. But in 2018, if you were to post about which one it was, you’d have been wading into one of the biggest internet debates of the decade.
On May 12th, 2018, redditor /u/RolandCamry posted this audio to /r/blackmagicfuckery. “What do you guys hear?”
Yanny? Or Laurel?
They’d gotten it from—spoiler alert—a reference pronunciation clip of the word “laurel” on a vocabulary website. Very quickly it spread all over Twitter, and people began comparing it to the black and blue, white and gold dress, which had gone viral a few years earlier.
The spread of Yanny or Laurel
Pretty much overnight everyone in the universe felt the need to weigh in.
Greek new age musician Yanni got in on the fun with this gif posted to Twitter. No surprise—he claimed to have heard his own name.
On May 17th, the Trump White House made a video about it, the United States Air Force made their own pretty controversial tweet about it (which ultimately they removed and apologized for), and so many celebrities weighed in.
Someone even wrote an erotic short story about it, titled “Seduced By The Handsome Physically Manifested Sound That Some People Hear As Yanny and Others Hear as Laurel.”
The science behind Yanny or Laurel
The science behind this and the reason that this was such a big thing is that everyone perceives sound slightly differently. Sound waves that make us hear Yanny occur at higher frequencies and those that let us hear Laurel are found in lower ones.
So if we take the sound clip and pitch it down, moving the Yanny highs into a lower more noticeable range, most people hear Yanny. But if we do the opposite and pitch the entire thing up, Laurel comes through clearly.
This also might be why many older people heard Laurel more often—as we age, our ability to hear high frequencies diminishes.
But it’s worth mentioning that there’s a psychological component to this too. If you’re primed to hear one or the other, that makes it more likely that you will. Some people even reported being able to will themselves into hearing either one.
So no matter whether you were on the technically correct side of this or not, it’s the controversy that makes the meme. According to one survey, people were split about 53 to 47 percent over which one they heard.
Whether you’re team Yanny or team Laurel, you’ve got company.
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