Internet Nerd Cracks the Yanny and Laurel Riddle

For the past few days the internet has provided us with yet another a new thing to obsess over and debate with others while avoiding doing actual work. Last year the same crowd of people fought each other over the color of a dress posted online.

Wired.com Now it is an audio clip of a woman saying, depending on who you ask, either “Yanny” or “Laurel”, reports C/Net.

Apparently, the clip comes from an opera singer hired by Vocabulary.com. Originally, no one knows who posted the segment, but that was not important to those fighting among themselves over what they hear.

C/Net writes that people “are fairly split over what the audio is saying, but team ‘Laurel’ is in the lead, according to social-media analytics firm Talkwalker. In fact, 53.9 percent of people hear ‘Laurel,’ while 46.1 percent hear ‘Yanny.’ And it’s clearly been quite a hot topic, given there’ve been 746,500 mentions of ‘Yanny’ versus ‘Laurel’ measured over the last 24 hours, the firm said.” A Reddit user has now come forward and said that he/she recorded the name ‘Laurel’ and posted it to the forum site.

Paul Ryan Hears “Laurel” - ABC News Social media is filled with those offering their interpretation of what they hear and the arguments attached to their comments. An audio expert “sounded off” to USA Today on the controversy. Here’s what he had to say: Bharath Chandrasekaran, an associate professor at The University of Texas, said he tested it with 10 people, and even they were divided: Half went for “Laurel” while the other half went for “Yanny.” “We live in a noisy world,” said Chandrasekaran, who teaches in the school’s department of communication sciences and disorders. “Very little information actually reaches our ears. It’s not surprising that this is perceived in different ways.”

Bharath Chandrasekaran - UT System The best headphones have a flat frequency response and don’t filter the sound, he says. But the cheaper the headphone, earbud or computer speaker, “the less reliable the quality of the audio.” As a result, “your brain makes all kinds of predictions” about what it thinks you’re hearing, he said. Kevin Cureghian, a Los Angeles-based audio engineer, attributes it to the difference in speakers. “Any speaker that can replicate enough ’low end’ or ‘bass’ — you will most likely hear Laurel. But any speaker that doesn’t reproduce lots of low end (smaller size speakers in general), you will most probably hear Yanny.” Cureghian tested this theory by putting a low pass filter into his audio software program on the file. With the low pass filter, he heard Laurel, but when he adjusted it with a high pass filter, to add in the high frequencies, “you will hear Yanny. I guarantee it.” Josh from Nerd It Up put on his Texas Aggies had and dove ears first into the controversy. With a little tweaking of the audio levels, he shows you how to get both names out of the same audio sample:

What do you think?