When I first heard this new meme, I thought I was being trolled. I mean, It’s obviously “Laurel”.
Out of curiosity, I asked my daughters and the younger (9) said she heard “Yarri” (didn’t prime her with choices).
So, in the tangential association with brain science, I give you https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/05/yanny-or-laurel-debate-reveals-more-about-our-brains-our-ears
Enjoy!
It is funny because last week we had audition specialist and neuroscientist David Schneider in our office, and he mentioned this exact phenomenon before it started trending.
This experiment could be a great test for whatever attention theory Numenta is/will be working on. Along with the spinning dancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_Dancer
The NYT even has a slider that makes it more absurd: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio-clip-yanny-laurel-debate.html
When I start the slider from Laurel and go to Yanny, I hear Laurel for a surprisingly long time, and hear Yanny if I start from Yanny.
It shows how attention is influenced by context.
I personally have trouble hearing “Yanny”. Sounds more like “Jerry” to me…
I heard it both ways on two different radio stations during the day, which indicates to me that one of the stations had their base pumped more than the other. It also indicates to me that my hearing response curve is relatively flat as one tends more toward Laurel if one has lost their highs.
The illusion may also have something to do with differing prior expectations being used to predict what is being said. There are other examples but this one is a good start:
That’s interesting… your experience closely matches my daughter’s. Without choice priming, she heard “Yarri”.
The testimony of you and your daughter on same audio configuration is, in my view, the most interesting of all… wasn’t it for this, I would start to doubt the encoding and hardware first. As @dotsteve noticed.
Much like the cited “blue dress” thing in your link in fact. Which I believe is related to screen gamma curves. Although I haven’t checked the development of well educated answers for a while.
Did nobody just slowed down the thing for us poor Laurels to finally hear Yanny ? Or the reverse experiment ? Seems odd. Because stuff like clamping at high pass won’t make me (or my speakers) more able to process at 20KHz if we were not in the first place.