This is most obvious with music, where training makes it easier to identify component parts of a symphony. What you hear - everything you hear - is shaped in some way by your previous experiences. Not only is it filling in what it thinks the sound should be, based on the prompt, it’s also quirky. So it’s not just your ears or your speakers - it’s also your brain, Chandrasekaran says. Here’s another example of how prompts shape what we hear: the same word can sound like “bill,” “pail,” or “mayo” depending on what’s on-screen. He also points to something else: the visual prompt that comes with the audio, Yanny or Laurel. “Because it’s noisy, your brain is filling in with what it thinks it should be.” “It’s a little bit noisy, so that itself causes perception to be a little more ambiguous,” he says. But he also blames the file’s noise for the confusion. He told us that half his lab hears Yanny, and half his lab hears Laurel. We also called up Bharath Chandrasekaran, a professor in the department of communications sciences and disorders at the University of Texas at Austin. That’s what it took for Riecke - changing his headset wasn’t enough. And changing the sound mix to emphasize higher or lower frequencies might tip you toward Laurel or Yanny. So if your sound card - or your ears - emphasize both the higher and the lower frequencies, you can toggle between the two sounds. Without knowing where this recording came from, he can’t be sure. He thinks that the frequencies of the Y might have been made artificially higher, and the frequencies that make the L sound might have been dropped, Riecke says, although he notes this is speculation. But Riecke suspects that these overlap more in the real world than in the audio recording that’s driving everyone up the wall. So the problems with perception might have something to do with that. Most sounds - including L and Y, which are among the ones at issue here - are made up of several frequencies at once. If you remove the high frequencies, you hear Laurel.
It’s a phenomenon you can mimic on a computer, he says: if you remove all the low frequencies, you hear Yanny. Older adults tend to start losing their hearing at the higher frequency ranges, which could explain why Riecke could only hear Laurel, but his eight-year-old daughter could hear Yanny.
But some of it is also the mechanics of your ears, and what you’re expecting to hear. Some of the variation may be due to the audio system playing the sound, Reicke says. The acoustic information that makes us hear Yanny is higher frequency than the acoustic information that makes us hear Laurel. What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel /jvHhCbMc8I- Cloe Feldman May 15, 2018
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