A Linguist Explains Why 'Laurel' Sounds Like 'Yanny'

Re:A Linguist Explains Why 'Laurel' Sounds Like 'Yanny' by Kaibeezy on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @04:47AM (#17080902)

There seems to be a lot of discussion and effort around a method to allow people who hear it one way to hear it the other: pitch shifting, change volume, different speakers, etc. I found a simple one, that worked with a basic laptop speaker and middle-aged ears.

If you hear "Yanny", put your hands over your ears. The tighter your hold them down, the more high frequencies are filtered out and you will hear "Laurel".

You can modulate that to hear both. Might work the other way too. Cup your hands and aim them at the speakers so you get more high frequency. Someone give it a try, eh?

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Re:A Linguist Explains Why 'Laurel' Sounds Like 'Yanny' by dwringer on Wednesday May 16, 2018 @01:26PM (#17084372)

I agree that muting or muffling allows the presumably original recording (of "Laurel") to come through better. I was hearing a nasally high-pitched "yanny" with a very faint low frequency monotone "laurel" until I heard it on a smaller speaker from across the room, when it was suddenly a normal speaking voice saying "Laurel".

Surprised there wasn't more discussion here about it that I could find. Seems like this was possibly found in a study of adversarial examples for audio codecs/speech processing systems?

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Re:A Linguist Explains Why 'Laurel' Sounds Like 'Yanny' by comex on Thursday May 17, 2018 @12:10AM (#17088658)

Nope, it's just a crappy recording:

https://www.wired.com/story/yanny-and-laurel-true-history

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