WE HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING IDEA WHY EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS
The Internet is up in arms about a contentious audio clip that has some folks hearing the word "Laurel" while others hear "Yanny." It's the infuriating case of the gold/blue dress again, and we're here to help (and laugh at you).
It's all about pitch-shift, ladies 'n' gents. “It depends on what part (what frequency range) of the signal you attend to,” UCLA linguistics professor and phonetics lab director Patricia Keating explained to the N.Y. Times. “I have no idea why some listeners attend more to the lower frequency range while others attend more to the higher frequency range. Age? How much time they spend talking on the phone?”
For what it's worth, the clip was originally found on the vocabulary.com page for “laurel.” We're sorry, yanny-ers; your ears are just weird.
Check out L.A. musician Ben Eshbach's debunking vid below and be amazed.
Laurel from Ben Eshbach on Vimeo.
