![]() The F2 is, for some reason (overlapping voices? Intentional shenanigans? The girl from The Ring?), masked.” This is perhaps the first ingredient into why it is so susceptible to being identified differently. “One thing about this signal is that it’s hard to track the F2. “Where there should be a second formant, there are just speckles that appear random,” he wrote. ![]() Benjamin Munsonīut zoom in on this clip and something is awry, Munson said: Benjamin Munson Vowels pronounced by humans have multiple formants, but the first two formants (F1 and F2) are crucial to determining what the vowel sounds like - such as whether you’re making an “eee” sound or an “ooo” sound. The dark bands represent what are known as “ formants,” the frequencies that resonate the loudest. This is a spectrogram (a visual representation of those frequencies) of the “Laurel versus Yanny” meme. Vowels and some consonants, like the those heard in “Laurel” and “Yanny,” have many frequencies when humans pronounce them through the vocal tract, Munson wrote, not unlike “hundreds of tuning forks playing at once.” One likely source of the confusion is the clip itself, which doesn’t correspond to the sounds humans generally make when they’re speaking. “But for the rest of us with po’folk headphones and old-folk hearing, we just hear the lowest-frequency components,” he wrote in an email.īut maybe don’t panic too much about your hearing if you’re on Team Laurel. People might be able to focus on the higher frequencies - the Yannys among us - because they have really great headphones or very good hearing, Benjamin Munson, a professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences at the University of Minnesota, suggested. Turnbull suggested that isolating these frequencies basically homes in on the critical information, making it easier for the brain to pay attention to just “Laurel” or just “Yanny.” Good news for both “Laurel” and “Yanny” people: the clip is pretty confusing #yanny #laurel /RN71WGyHwe- Dylan Bennett May 16, 2018 RT so we can avoid the whole dress situation. Here's what it sounds like without high/low freqs. If you can't hear high freqs, you probably hear laurel. If you can hear high freqs, you probably hear "yanny", but you *might* hear "laurel". Video game developer Dylan Bennett made a video that illustrates what’s going on here: It really comes down to how our brains pick up on and interpret these frequencies, Rory Turnbull, a professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaii, said. If you hear “Yanny,” you’re picking up on the higher frequency. So if you’re hearing “Laurel,” you’re likely picking up on the lower frequency. “Typically, if you have a high-quality recording and you’re listening on a good device of some sort, you’re not ever going to be confused by those,” Story said. ![]() One reason for the confusion is the poor quality of the recording. The word “Yanny,” the second frequency, has almost exactly the same pattern as the L, R, L in “Laurel,” he added. ![]() “So when you’re listening to ‘Laurel,’ the reason you get L, R, and L is because of the movement of that third frequency,” he said. Story said the lowest of the three frequencies is “absolutely essential” for the L’s and R’s - the consonants that make up “Laurel.” Humans typically pay attention to three different frequencies when they’re listening to speech. “There’s just enough ambiguity in this fairly low-quality recording that people are hearing it one way and some people are hearing it another,” Brad Story, the associate department head of speech, language, and hearing sciences at Arizona State University, told me. So what’s going on here? The clip is playing around with frequency - and it depends on the range of frequencies listeners hear. Some people even hear “Geery” or “Garry” or something in between.) That should have settled it, because it’s obviously “Laurel.” But people out there are convinced, for some reason, that this weird robot voice is repeating “Yanny.” (Some people even claim they alternate between hearing “Laurel” and “Yanny,” or, strangest of all, hear both simultaneously. What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel /jvHhCbMc8I- Cloe Feldman May 15, 2018 ![]()
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