Yanny or Laurel? The Sound that Divided the Internet
One chaotic week in 2018, the internet was torn apart by one singular audio clip. Two syllables, repeated over and over, sparked worldwide confusion. I was a voice saying “Yanny” or “Laurel”. If you ask me, I heard Yanny on my first listen, but now I can easily switch between the two (unlike the dress mentioned in one of my previous posts). I am here once again to talk about how the same audio can be interpreted differently by ears around the world, the same way one picture of a dress can be interpreted differently by eyes around the world.
In my article about “The Dress,” I related the function of our visual system to a camera. I clarified that the eyes do not record everything like a camera, but use context and past experience to interpret visual cues. Similarly, our ears do not hear everything like a microphone. They interpret input based on frequencies and expectations, which can also change as we age.
Hearing isn’t always believing.
Sound waves are interpreted by entering the eardrum, travelling to the inner are, and activating hair cells. The auditory cortex in your brain constructs what you hear based on the activation patterns of your hair cells, past experiences, and the sensitivity of your ears, all of which can differ from each individual (Moore 2012).
When people hear different words in the audio clip, it is caused by the brain forming different perceptions of the same signal, not personal preference.
The Science Behind It
The audio clip contains a mixture of frequencies. When analyzed, it was found that there were frequencies at both the low range (400-500 Hz) and high range (2500-300 Hz) in the audio clip (Rosen 2018). People who hear “Laurel” tend to emphasize lower frequencies, while people who hear “Yanny” tend to emphasize high frequencies (Rosen 2018). This is similar to “The Dress,” where people who saw each color set had a different preference for color undertones.
Presbycusis is a phenomenon that causes people to lose sensitivity to upper ranges of audio frequency as they age, causing a physical variation in how people hear (Gates et. al., 2006). Since “Yanny” is encoded in high-frequency sounds, it is more likely for it to be heard by younger people (like me!).
Surveys have shown that it was more likely for older adults to hear “Laurel” due to its lower frequencies. These frequencies are more stable throughout one’s lifespan.
Why does the brain choose one word over the other?
Top-down processing is when the brain uses existing knowledge and experience to interpret sensory information, instead of letting the sensory information motivate the interpretation. This type of processing is important for interpreting ambiguous sounds such as this one (Hickok & Poeppel, 2007). If your brain is used to certain vowels or speech patterns, you may hear a specific word. For example, more American English speakers heard “Laurel” because the low-frequency format is common in American English, while listeners who spoke a language with a higher-frequency format were more likely to hear ‘Yanny’ (Samuel, 2011).
What does this reveal?
Our brain does not perceive all the senses the same way as everyone else! Hearing sounds that are ambiguous forces our brain to guess and not all brains guess the same way.
References
Gates, G. A., & Mills, J. H. (2005). Presbycusis. The Lancet, 366(9491), 1111–1120. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67423-5
Hickok, G., & Poeppel, D. (2007). The cortical organization of speech processing. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8(5), 393–402. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2113
Moore, B. C. J. (2012). An introduction to the psychology of hearing (6th ed.). Brill.
Rosen, J. (2018). The science behind Yanny vs. Laurel: Why we hear what we hear. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 144(1), 62. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5052025
Samuel, A. G. (2011). Speech perception. Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 49–72. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131643
