What Do You Hear? YANNY or LAUREL?

The internet's favourite debate is now on Yanny or Laurel, a mystery that has divided us into two.

The computer-generated audio clip has been interpreted by some as 'Yanny' while others swore they heard 'Laurel'. What do you hear?

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The Yanny or Laurel debate is similar to one of 'the dress' in 2015, a photograph of a dress that went viral after audience disagreed on the depicted colour (black and blue; white and gold) of the dress.

After much divided opinions on Reddit, Twitter user Chloe Feldman shared a poll on the social media platform asking the internet for their views. The actual Yanny or Laurel audio clip is shared on the tweet.

What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel pic.twitter.com/jvHhCbMc8I

— Cloe Feldman (@CloeCouture) 15 May 2018

Results from the poll showed that 47% of the voters heard Yanny while the remaining 53% heard Laurel.

Photo from AsapSCIENCE via YouTube

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Science Behind The Debate

 1. Priming

According to experts, if we have never seen any mention of 'Yanny' or 'Laurel', there's a chance that we might have interpreted the audio recording as something else.

Sooo... if no one mentioned any of these names, there wouldn't have been any debate to begin with.

2. Sound Waves

Photo from Soundwave and Analysis Courtesy of Brad Story

Brad Story, a Professor of Speech, Language and Hearing came up with his Yanny or Laurel analysis based on the recording's sound wave.

The highlighted sound waves are the acoustic features of his audio for Laurel and Yanny.

As we can see, they share very similar frequencies. Though they seem to sound very different when we articulate them in reality, they are probably more similar than you can imagine.

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Photo from AsapSCIENCE via YouTube

The devices (mobile phone, laptop, earphones etc.) we use to listen to the audio recording affects what we hear too.

However, some of you here might have heard the recording with your friend using the same device. However, you must find it weird why you girls got different results even....

Moment of Truth

Well, it is probably because of the age of your ears.

The sounds in 'Yanny' plays at a higher frequency as compared to 'Laurel', which has a lower frequency.

As we age, our ears would not be able to hear sounds at a higher frequency as well. So if you are hearing 'Yanny', you are likely to have younger ears.

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So... what do you hear?

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Text by: Girlsdaily SG