Yanny or laurel: the audio clip explained

The Internet is buzzing about an audio clip posted by high school student Cloe Feldman, known on YouTube and social media as CloeCoture. Considered the current day version of “the dress,” which had people debating whether an image of a dress was blue and black or white and gold, the audio clip has people fighting over whether it is saying “Yanny” or “Laurel.”

To everyone that hears “Yanny,” you’re not crazy. And to everyone that hears “Laurel,” neither are you. Since the low-quality clip went viral, researchers became interested in the science behind the controversial fad.

Brad Story, associate department head of speech, language and hearing sciences at Arizona State University, said people hear different sounds because of the frequencies they pay attention to. According to Story, the word in the recording is “Laurel,” but the lowest frequency for the consonants is similar for L’s and R’s.

“So when you’re listening to ‘Laurel’ the reason you get L, R and L is because of the movement of that third frequency,” Story said. The frequency pattern of the word “Yanny” is almost an exact copy as the L, R, L pattern.

”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 in a Vox.com news article.

New York Times built a tool that can be manipulated to vary the words’ frequencies so people can clearly hear “Yanny” and “Laurel.” Click here to view the scale.