The internet was flung into chaos a few days ago when a robotic recording surfaced. Was it saying “Yanny”? Or “Laurel”? Hard lines were drawn. Coworkers, friends, and family were torn apart. But this speech scientist claims to have found the answer to settle things once and for all.
It’s laurel. And the original recording from Vocabulary.com serves as definitive proof.
The resolution has undoubtedly left many in complete shell shock. How could one be so certain of something so wrong?
From Business Insider:
“Speech perception and production depends heavily on an internal map of speech sounds,” Kothare said. “You learn this map while learning to speak as a toddler and also while hearing others speak on a day-to-day basis.”
If you mess with the frequencies in a recording, you can change what people hear — it’s similar to the way that our eyes can be tricked by an optical illusion.
The New York Times tried this on Wednesday and created an audio-switching tool for the recording.
It turns out that our brains can shift pretty easily between hearing “yanny” and “laurel” based just on how low or high the frequency of the recording is. Add to this all the cultural and linguistic ways we’ve been trained to hear certain vowels, and you have a perfect recipe for a little audio illusion.
I was Team Yanny all the way at first. Then I read you can hear either one depending on whether you focus on the high notes or the low notes and suddenly, I was able to hear Laurel. At first, both sides seemed so certain they were right. But as Yanny v. Laurel raged on, that line began to blur. In the end, we all realized we were just a bunch of kids swept up in one of history’s most turbulent events.
But it’s all over now. That’s it. The debate has been going on for five years now (in internet time) but this scientist has just dropped the war-ending nuke. The boys are coming home. The Yannys have been defeated in a controversial move that they say will be better for humanity in the long run.
Maybe now the world can begin to heal.
