You may have heard of the Laurel/Yanny debate spreading all over the internet. An audio clip was posted of computer saying a word, and about half of the people hear the word Yanny and half hear the word Laurel.
This was originally posted on the website Reddit.com as a quesetion to see what people hear. You can check it out here:
The post got spread to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and all over the internet in a matter of a few days. It went so viral even some news agencies cover the contraversy.
So which is it? Is the person saying Yanny or Laurel?
The answer is actually neither or I suppose both depending on how you look at it, but either way it’s not just Laurel or Yanny. Your brain is just perceiving it one way or another.
Here is the original audio:
Depending on who you are and/or what device you’re listening on, you will either hear the word Laurel or Yanny.
So lets take a look at what’s going here. As we discussed in our article What Makes A Good Scientific Question, one of the things we need to look at things scientifically is measurability. With the Laurel/Yanny debate, we need to see what we can measure.
There are some great audio tools available to analyze audio clips and one of them is called a spectrograph. A spectrograph analyzes data at different frequencies within an audio clip mapping them with color for intensity. The X-axis is time of the clip, and the Y-axis is the frequency of the noise, and the color at any given point is the intensity. Here is the spectrograph for the above audio clip:
We are going to focus specifically on the red and white portions where the intensities are the highest, which is what makes up the bulk of the sound and how the word is formed. This original clip had a lot of static in the background which shows as blue “noise”. You may notice that there are 4 individual repeating graphs. This is because the word is said twice (so repeated left to right). The top and bottom is the left and right channel from the audio file.
Now that we have our data for the spectrograph for the original clip, let’s look at a clip of the words laurel and Yanny being read out by a computer. I used Google Text To Speech to get the audio clips:
While these clips aren’t perfect, nor the same exact voice etc, it gives us a way to create a visual representation of how each word looks and sounds on a spectrograph. Here are the spectrographs for each clip:
If you compare the three spectrographs for just one channel for when the word is said, you can see that they are all very similar.
As you can see, the original audio clip appears to be more of an amalgamation of Laurel and Yanny instead of completely one or the other. It has portions of both Laurel and Yanny, but it’s not specifically one or the other.
This brings us to a concept called latent inhibition. Basically, latent inhibition is our brains ability to ignore information that is not relevant to us. Every day, we have so much information thrown at us that it would be impossible for us to process and retain all of it. For example,what color was that car you passed on the way to work? What did that person say as you were walking past them at lunch? Can you hear the ticking of the clock if you’re not focused on it? Birds chirping, the feel of your pants on your leg, or how tight your shoes are on your feet right now… The list goes on and on. Our brains have billions of stimuli being thrown at it every day and there is no way it can possibly process and store it all.
As a result, our brains evolved to drop unnecessary information. In addition, are brains are also programed to try to find patterns in speech and to find words as they are most often heard. In the case of the Yanny vs Laurel debate, the sounds for both are within the recording, and the actual audio information for both Yanny and Laurel are very similar. But why does all of that result in some people hearing Yanny and others hearing Laurel? Many factors go into what you hear. For example, depending on what device you are listening on, (one might have more treble, or more base changing which frequencies are heard loudeset), or how well your ear is able distinguish different frequencies, or even your natural preference to hear certain frequencies or words, your brain will drop some of the audio information and you may here Yanny where your best friend may hear Laurel.
But the real answer is that it’s neither Yanny nor Laurel, and this is made evident when you slow the clip down to half speed:
As you will likely hear (though some people may still hear a word), the word becomes gibberish when slowed down, neither Yanny or Laurel. When it’s slowed down, your brain isn’t used to hearing a word being said that slowly, so it’s able to pick up more of the information, and you hear neither word. This clearly shows that it’s not one word or the other. So next time someone asks you if it’s Laurel or Yanny, you can say neither, because… science!
Feel free to comment below and let us know what you hear for each audio clip!