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HomeScienceLaurel or Yanny? Depends on who is listening

Laurel or Yanny? Depends on who is listening

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Laurel and Yanny have been driving everyone crazy on Twitter over the past 24 hours. In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, listen to this clip.

What did you hear? If you hear Laurel, it might be unfathomable to you that someone would hear Yanny, and vice versa.

The audio was first shared as an Instagram story by Katie Hetzel, a student at Flowery Branch High School in Georgia. She played the vocabulary.com audio of her favourite word ‘Laurel’ but was stumped to hear the sound ‘Yanny’ instead, while some of her classmates said they heard ‘Laurel’ just fine. Her story was shared on Reddit by a friend and then picked up on Twitter.

It’s very much The Dress all over again. And yet again, the answer lies not in our sensory organs but in our brains.

Mind games

Brains have their own ways of processing information around us to ensure our survival. For example, we see our nose almost all the time but our brain decides to filter that information out because it just isn’t useful to us on a daily basis. But now that you know, you can’t stop seeing your nose. Until you forget, that is.

Similarly, when we hear audio frequencies, the brain decides which ones to keep, which to amplify, and how to interpret ambiguous signals. Every sound we make and hear comes with its own frequency. Depending on what we expect and what we’re used to hearing, the brain amplifies certain frequencies for us to notice them.

“It is possible that I hear the name Laurel because I know someone by that name or the word is familiar to me,” explains Rexy Varkey, senior audiologist at Manasa Cochlear Implant and ENT centre, Bangalore. “Our brain chooses sounds that are comfortable to it.”

So people who hear Laurel have their brains more tuned in to the frequencies produced by the Laurel than Yanny. Because of this familiarity, shaped by past experiences, their brains choose to amplify frequencies that will result in the word Laurel.

Note matters

The sounds “l” and “r” are heard more at lower frequencies, while “y” and “ee” at higher. Here, you can hear Laurel at lower frequencies and Yanny at higher ones.

But the original audio clip isn’t fully clean; there is a strong overlay of external noise.

When we turn the signal or even the volume way down, the lower frequency sounds are all filtered out and only the higher ones are audible. Watch how at really low pitches we hear Yanny, and Laurel at higher.

What we hear also depends very much on our devices. More bass makes you hear Laurel more. Inexpensive earphones can often filter out certain frequencies, especially on the higher side, resulting in Yanny.

An interactive NYT tool allows us to use a slider to figure out when the names change. Note that when you move the slider real slow towards Yanny, the name changes at some point. When you hear Yanny and move the slider slowly back to Laurel, you can still hear Yanny for a bit because the brain now expects to hear it.

This is quite similar to how the dress worked as well. Because of the image’s ambiguous lighting, our brains decided to interpret light in their own way. If your brain thinks there’s natural daylight where a blue tint is indicative of shadows, it perceives the dress as white and yellow. If it thinks the dress is in an indoor setting, it thinks the true color is blue and black, which it was.

https://64c5f.https.cdn.softlayer.net/8064C5F/theprint.in/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/miya\_170511sakushinicodress02.gif

Gif credit: pixiv user jigglypuff39

Similarly with sounds, any ambiguity is fixed by our brain to prevent confusion. Songs by the band Sigur Ros are great examples. Several of them have no lyrics and instead simply have gibberish words (“Hopelandic”). But when we hear them, our brain tries to find patters and slot the sounds into sounds we recognise. The same song might sound like it’s in Spanish to someone, Icelandic to someone else, or English to a third person, when it’s actually none of these.

                                 Lyrics start at 1:30 minutes into the video

“Music is often linked to memories and our brains dig around to find familiar sounds. It happens unconsciously without us realising,” explains Varkey. “Our brain realises there is ambiguity and it decides to fix it for us.”

Interestingly, musicians and sound engineers often immediately hear both Laurel and Yanny simultaneously because their brains are more attuned to hearing and accepting sounds across various frequencies.

You can test out the kind of frequencies your brain prefers with the Laurel and Yanny clip. When sped up really high, you should hear one name and when slowed down, the name should suddenly switch.

In what order do you hear the clip in the above tweet? Tweet to us at @ThePrintIndia.

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