Yanny or Laurel? Why Your Ears Disagreed

Yanny or Laurel? Both sides heard it right. The clip was a dictionary's pronunciation recording of the word "laurel", made in 2007 by an opera singer for vocabulary.com, and in May 2018 a Georgia student looking up the word heard "Yanny" instead.

It spread from her Instagram story to a classmate's poll, to Reddit, and then to YouTuber Cloe Feldman's tweet on 15 May 2018, which split the internet. The sound really carries both words: its lower frequencies follow a "laurel" pattern and its higher frequencies a "yanny" pattern, and the low-quality recording blurs the two (Brad Story, University of Arizona; Lars Riecke, Maastricht University; the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics). Which one you heard depended on the speaker or headphones you used and on your ears: high-frequency hearing fades with age, so older listeners tend to hear Laurel. The New York Times built a slider that shifts the frequencies so you can hear either word, and a Max Planck study with more than 500 listeners showed that the sentence played before the clip can change which word you hear. The word in the recording is laurel. Your ears weren't wrong.

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