It's both 'Yanny' and 'Laurel', and it's neither of them
Do we only hear what we want to hear? Do we only see what we want to see? Do we only believe what we want to believe? In the age of post-truth, propaganda, and unprecedented amounts of ideological polarisation, these questions have ironically become relevant thanks to the memetic nature of the internet. The world, including the White House, is divided on a fundamental choice — is it Yanny or is it Laurel?
What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel pic.twitter.com/jvHhCbMc8I
— Cloe Feldman (@CloeCouture) May 15, 2018
This illusion is neither the first one to have divided the internet into two giant factions — more than half a million people have heard the clip and it’s almost a 50-50 tie — nor will it be the last. Do you remember the great debate that broke the internet in 2015? Is the dress black and blue, or is it white and gold? And barely 48 hours after “Laurel or Yanny”, the subreddit “BlackMagicFuckery” presented the internet with a new quandary, in the form yet another auditory illusion: "Brainstorm" or "Green Needle"?
So which is it?
Donald Trump may hear the word “Covfefe” and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders may call Laurel, “fake news from CNN,” but really it is both and it is neither.
Think about this for a second. If you were provided with neither Laurel nor Yanny to choose from, what would you hear? Possibly neither. This is something known as “Priming”. It is a technique whereby exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. Priming is often used to subtly affect the choices we make, whether it is voting or consuming or pretty much any other decision we take. Hence, if you were told to choose between “Robert” and “Wally” for the same audio clip without having any prior knowledge, you’d probably make a choice between the two options you’ve been given.
It’s a phenomenon most effectively used in advertising. The Cambridge-Analytica exposé demonstrated how private Facebook data of voters was used to target them with personalised political ads, something that had a visible effect on the 2016 US presidential elections. Donald Trump won. If you are given enough subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) stimuli, your actions are likely to be affected by it.
In this case, if you are in a group and most people tell you they heard “Yanny”, odds are you will hear “Yanny” as well.
Coming back to the clip itself, it is subject to bistable perceptions. Essentially, both interpretations are subjective and tend to “alternate stochastically between the different interpretations”. And when confronted with an ambiguous stimulus, the human brain can rapidly achieve an unambiguous interpretation, which is usually accompanied by biases — this again takes us back to priming.
In any case, the words “Laurel” and “Yanny”, when spoken or played on a device, emit similar soundwaves. As many on the internet also demonstrated, what you hear may depend on your age: if you can hear high frequencies, you probably hear "Yanny", and if you can't hear high frequencies (which happens as you grow older), you probably hear “Laurel”. Dana Boebinger, a PhD student at Harvard and MIT studying auditory perception, explained on Twitter that another reason why different people hear different results is because different headphones and speakers filter the frequencies of the sound in different ways.
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An old song comes to mind when one thinks about the “Laurel and Yanny” conundrum. “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” a 1972 song composed by Italian entertainer Adriano Celentano and performed by him and his wife, Claudia Mori has lyrics that sound phonetically like American English — or at least what many Italians hear when an American speaks — but are, as Vittoria Traverso of Atlas Obscura described it: clearly total, utter, delightful nonsense.
The gibberish sounds like American English because our ears are accustomed to a certain idea of American English.
Sandhya Ramesh of The Print, noted that songs by the Icelandic avant-garde band Sigur Rós, who sing mostly in a made-up language called “Vonlenska” or “Hopelandic”, have a similar quality to them. She argued that, “when we hear them, our brain tries to find patters and slot the sounds into sounds we recognise. The same song might sound like it’s in Spanish to someone, Icelandic to someone else, or English to a third person, when it’s actually none of these.”
So what is it: “Yanny” or “Laurel”? It is what you want it to be. Say “Laurel” enough times, and you might start hearing it. Say “Yanny” enough times and you might hear that.
There's not really a correct answer either way.