Sound's like a good word

What did you hear? Is your brain playing games with you? Or is half the world lying about having heard yanny instead or laurel? After the blue-black, white-gold dress broke the internet, the audio of a weird squeaky robot sound has divided the online population into two halves. While some claim to have heard both, some strictly stick to having decided that the word being spoken is only “yanny” or only “laurel”. This three second audio clip was posted on Reddit by an 18-year-old and later picked up by a YouTuber and social media influencer, Cloe Feldman who shared it on her twitter and Instagram asking people to vote as to what they hear. This became a sensation and an obsession overnight for the youth because it’s fascinating but equally creepy.

“I’m sure I heard laurel but I’m not sure if it’s the right thing. Such things are an indication of the fact that people perceive things differently. Getting obsessed with this does not seem like a problem because it helps people try and find out more about these kinds of uncertainties which have always led to new findings and discoveries.” says Sachu James, a media undergraduate student who stumbled upon this trend on Instagram.

 Tenzin Norzom says, “I saw this audio going viral on Instagram stories of Buzzfeed and BBC and I heard the clip. My sister and I agreed on ‘Yanny’. This is interesting because a sound generated by robots can also mark a difference between the older and the younger generation. Where most of us heard Yanny, I read that most of the older people heard Laurel!”

Shikhar Srivastav, a sound engineer analysed the sound clip and found that the clip, is composed of the word ‘Yanny’ in the higher frequencies and the word ‘Laurel’ in the lower frequencies. He explains , “This happens because most of the people’s brains and ears are more sensitive to lower frequencies than higher ones and hence those who perceive higher range hear Yanny whereas the others hear Laurel. Our ears are most sensitive to higher frequencies when we are young and as we grow older, our ears lose the power to hear higher frequencies, that’s why children below 10 years will always hear Yanny and the older people could hear Laurel or fluctuate between the two also depending upon the sound instrument we hear the audio from.”

Akrit Noel Michael got to know of this trend when his feed was full of Team Laurel and Team Yanny posts and having posted a poll on his Instagram story himself, found that 55% of the responses received heard “Yanny”. “I heard Yanny 98% of the times. But, only twice was a distinctive “laurel” audible. It blew my mind as it seems like an unseemly thing to happen!” Akrit adds, “Everyone loves a dispute and people live for controversy. Such cases wherein members of the public can be made to plot against each other have gained popularity in recent times due to the ease of the advent of the internet.”

 Debates about if such trends are baseless or not is still debatable as curiosity leads to people learning something new such as the reason why your brain recognises Yanny instead of Laurel and vice versa. Visual and auditory controversies have broke the internet and what awaits is only a mystery, quite like our brain.

— Aditi Jayakumar