It's also worth noting that people are expecting to hear either "yanny" or "laurel," which makes it more likely that they actually will hear one of those words and not something else.įor Kraus, the Northwestern professor who runs a laboratory on the biology of how humans process sound, it matters little how people interpret this single word in a poor-quality, idiosyncratic recording. For example, if you hear the sounds in either "yanny" or "laurel" more in your everyday life, you might be more likely to hear them here. ![]() "But not only that, the brains themselves can be wired very differently to interpret speech," he says. Some people have greater sensitivity to higher frequencies or lower frequencies, Yazel says, which could explain part of why people hear different things. "If you lose the high frequencies, the illusion goes away." That filtering "takes away the entire perception of hearing the word 'yanny' and all you get is the word 'laurel,' " he says. Take a look here:īritt Yazel, a neuroscience doctoral student at University of California, Davis, analyzed the sound file and filtered out all the sound above the frequency 4.5 kilohertz. Both words share a U-shaped pattern, though they correspond to different sets of frequencies that the vocal tract produces, Story explains. He noticed similarities in the features of these words, which you can see below. He carried out his own experiment by analyzing a waveform image of the viral recording and compared it to recordings of himself saying "laurel" and "yanny." Story says the two words have similar patterns that easily could be confused. "And if you throw things off a little bit, in terms of it being somewhat unnatural, then it is possible to fool that perceptual system and our interpretation of it," says Story. Primary information that would be present in a high-quality recording or in person is "weakened or attenuated," Story says, even as the brain is eagerly looking for patterns to interpret. The poor quality of the audio, likely re-recorded multiple times, makes it more open to interpretation by the brain, says Brad Story, a professor of speech, language and hearing sciences at the University of Arizona. ![]() (Spoiler alert: Based on what the Redditor who claims to be the original poster said, the original recording is probably this one on, which says "laurel.")
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