Yanny or Laurel?

[spambot]

All I hear is "brain storm" or "green storm"

[Broken_Erika]

I hear them screaming! Screaming in my mind! They tell me to burn things, kill people, watch Fox News, Entertainment Tonight and vote Conservative!

[Dinner]

Why does it keep saying kill for Satan?

[Broken_Erika]

Why does it keep saying kill for Satan?

If you play it backwards; it says Justin Beiber Forever!

[-Jrabbit]

In terms of audio, it's not even clever. Simple overlay mixing 2 channels into one. Boring.

That makes me think it's either harvesting data, testing propagation, or distributing mal-/spy-/software.

[Elok]

Is that how they did it? Basically, just playing the two sounds together and recording both? I could hear a bit of both, when I listened at work. The hotness of the trend does somewhat mystify me, but then I'm not cool.

[-Jrabbit]

Similarly, I can hear either/both depending on focus. The alleged "idea" behind it is to show that different people hear/perceive things differently. DUH!

As we age, many people slowly lose their high frequency perception. Since Yanny is higher in pitch than Laurel, those with high-freq loss will tend to hear Laurel. But there are so many variable involved, that's still fairly meaningless. First, both are in normal "speech" range, and age-related high frequency loss is way up the scale from that.

Other things that can affect how you perceive this: crappy computer speakers, file compression, environmental background noise, etc. Turns out the gear you heard the file on first will color your perception on other platforms as well - which is at least moderately interesting.

But basically, the whole thing is so meaningless that even the entire pro audio industry - which is full of self-important blowhards like me - is having trouble finding anything insightful to say about it.

The big question is, how did this thing get traction? It's kind of inherently uninteresting...

[Proteus_MST]

I'd asume the little demonstration isn't aimed at proifessional sound technicians or neurobiologists, but rather at "normal people" who may not actually be aware of the fact that each individual perceives the world in a (sometimes totally) different manner

[-Jrabbit]

The claim being made is that the original was an innocent recording of "laurel" done about 10 years ago for vocabulary.com. Someone played it, heard "yanny" and thought it was weird. A friend then posted it to Reddit, and it proceeded to go viral from there.

The oddball things that people find engaging never cease to amaze me.

[spambot]

In terms of audio, it's not even clever. Simple overlay mixing 2 channels into one. Boring.

That makes me think it's either harvesting data, testing propagation, or distributing mal-/spy-/software.

They didn't do that, as far as I know. It's just a computer generated voice that's supposed to be saying "laurel".

[-Jrabbit]

It is a human voice. The opera singer hired by vocabulary.com to record it (because of his excellent diction) has been documented.

[spambot]

But is he a robot?

[Aeson]

From my own experience, humans can't make opera sounds. I've tried. Not possible. Must be a robot or alien!

[Broken_Erika]

From my own experience, humans can't make opera sounds. I've tried. Not possible. Must be a robot or alien!

Yanny, Laurel, Robot? Lobot!