Main image via WFMZ
The internet is going through its second biggest division since the dress debate in 2015. If somehow you haven’t yet heard about this for the last few days, give this audio recording a listen.
What do you hear? Yanny? Or Laurel? If you heard ‘laurel’, then you’re technically correct. Here’s why.
This infamous audio recording has been traced back to reddit, but actually originated from the online dictionary website Vocabulary.com under the entry for ‘laurel’, “a wreath worn on the head, usually as a symbol for victory”.
Many people think that the voice in the recording belongs to a robot, kinda like Siri. But the reading was actually recorded by an opera singer! Marc Tinkler, CTO and founder of Vocabulary.com, said that when the site first launched, they looked for individuals with strong pronunciation and the ability to read words written in the international phonetic alphabet.
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“We hired a bunch of opera singers to record 200,000 words.” The same guy who recorded ‘laurel’, recorded over 36,000 words for Vocabulary.com, including the word ‘audacity'.
The debate began on 11 May 2018, when Katie Hetzel, a student from a high school in Georgia, was studying for her World Literature Class. ‘Laurel’ was one of the vocabulary words she had to look up. She searched for the word on Vocabulary.com and played the pronunciation audio on the site.
To Katie’s surprise, instead of the word in front of her, Katie heard the audio say ‘yanny’.
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“I asked my friends in my class and we all heard mixed things,” she said. She then posted the audio clip to her Instagram story. Later, Fernando Castro, a senior at her school, re-published the audio clip to his Instagram story as a poll. A reddit user and friend of Castro said that he then took the audio from Castro’s Instagram poll and posted it to reddit.
And, the rest is history. The yanny/laurel debate has gotten so huge that several celebrities are getting in on it too. Those who hear ‘yanny’ include Steven King, Bebe Rexha and Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Melissa Fumero.
On the other hand, Christine Teigen, Ellen DeGeneres, Piers Morgan and Logan Paul are on team ‘laurel’.
There are also some celebrities that are just completely confused.
Thankfully, scientists have already explained why different people hear different things when they listen to the recording. There are lots of different things that come to play and affect what you hear, but here are a few factors that you could take into consideration:
- What you hear depends on which frequencies your brain emphasises. Higher frequency sounds in the clip sound like ‘yanny’, while the lower frequency sounds make ‘laurel’.
- What you hear might also depend on your age. Apparently, as you age, you start to lose your hearing in the higher frequency range. So, younger people are more likely to hear ‘yanny’ and vice versa.
- Different headphones and speakers filter frequencies differently. Also, the differences in the audio could have something to do with how Twitter or Instagram compresses the files.
Try this on for size:
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So, there you have it. And yes, in case you were wondering, ‘laurel’ is the most popular entry on Vocabulary.com now.
Info via WIRED
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