Yanny or Laurel? One audio, but people hear different words. Why ?

Yanny or Laurel ? Listen to the audio here.

In case you haven’t already come across it, an audio is going viral that if you listen to, you will hear either ‘Yanny’ or ‘Laurel’. Before you read any further I guess you wanna try it. So here is the link to audio, try it for yourself.

So you heard Yanny or Laurel ? You don’t understand why the confusion arise because you heard either of the names very clearly. Well now play the audio to someone else, preferably an older person. See what he/she hears. Try it with a few people because already 47 percent of people have reported hearing Yanny and 53 percent people hear Laurel.

The dispute began when a blogger Cloe Feldman tweeted a question about this piece of audio asking “ What do you hear”?Yanny or Laurel ? Soon the internet split in to groups hearing Yanny on one side and Laurel on the other. The post was originally from Reddit and  then posted in to Twitter. The original post may have come from a person named Roland Camry who said the word originated from Vocabulary.com. The original word posted was ‘Laurel’ but Camry’s sister heard Yanny and that’s where all the confusion began

So Why do People hear it differently?
Poppy Crum, a chief scientist at Dolby Laboratories has the explanation. “People who hear or weigh high/mid-high frequency more strongly will hear ‘Yanny,'” Crum said. “The perception of ‘Laurel’ is experienced when the lower frequency information is dominant in the experience”. But apart from that Crum also states that the sound is perceived differently on a physiological level by different individuals.

“Language, dialect, exposure to relevant sounds in someone’s environment, and even gender from the content of our own voices can alter how we experience the exact same information,” Crum said.

So where does Crum falls in this debate? Well he hears Yanny all the time and he says that’s his ‘perpetual reality’

A few years go a similar debate broke out in internet regarding the colour a dress. Different people saw different colour in the same dress and it took sometime to explain it scientifically.