I hated every second of writing about that bloody ‘what colour is this dress’ nonsense, but now I’m kind of taken with this ‘Yanny or Laurel’ audio clip.

I get that eyes can be deceived, but surely we all hear the same thing?

Turns out that isn’t the case, and a clip being shared by Cloe Feldman on Twitter is a clear illustrator of that.

Before we go any further, take a listen:

What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel pic.twitter.com/jvHhCbMc8I

— Cloe Feldman (@CloeCouture) May 15, 2018

I hear what I hear (Laurel), and I can’t imagine hearing anything else, but at the moment the office is split right down the middle.

[Update – I went back and listened. It’s changed to Yanny. What is life?]

If you check out the replies to Cloe’s tweet, you’ll see the debate rages on.

Some people even hear ‘Yanny’, and then later hear ‘Laurel’, but no one is reporting a straight switch in the other direction.

This is stupid and part of me hates talking about it, but a quick Google search reveals that some serious heavyweights are paying attention:

Oh cool, just Nat Geo and the New York Times and the Guardian, amongst others.

I’ll go to The Verge for an explanation of sorts, but first a look at how it’s tearing their office apart:

When Verge Science listened to it this morning, fighting broke out between the Yanny and Laurel factions. (Ed. note: I briefly lost my mind, as I first heard Yanny, then heard Laurel for about two hours, and now hear Yanny again. Same device, same speakers. Please send help.)

Great, we’re still doing OK with just minor disagreements this side.

They called on a few experts to get to the bottom of this auditory argument:

According to Lars Riecke, an assistant professor of audition and cognitive neuroscience at Maastricht University, it’s not actually an illusion. In fact, it’s an ambiguous figure, the auditory equivalent of two figures in profile that also forms a vase, called Rubin’s vase. “The input can be organized [sic] in two alternative ways,” he says.

The secret is frequency. The acoustic information that makes us hear Yanny is higher frequency than the acoustic information that makes us hear Laurel. Some of the variation may be due to the audio system playing the sound, Reicke says. But some of it is also the mechanics of your ears, and what you’re expecting to hear.

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. It’s a phenomenon you can mimic on a computer, he says: if you remove all the low frequencies, you hear Yanny. If you remove the high frequencies, you hear Laurel.

Yes, it was the youngest member of staff who heard ‘Yanny’. The pieces are falling into place.

Bharath Chandrasekaran, a professor in the department of communications sciences and disorders at the University of Texas at Austin, has more to add:

He told us that half his lab hears Yanny, and half his lab hears Laurel. But he also blames the file’s noise for the confusion. “It’s a little bit noisy, so that itself causes perception to be a little more ambiguous,” he says. “Because it’s noisy, your brain is filling in with what it thinks it should be.”

He also points to something else: the visual prompt that comes with the audio, Yanny or Laurel. That might help shape what people hear…

So it’s not just your ears or your speakers — it’s also your brain, Chandrasekaran says. Not only is it filling in what it thinks the sound should be, based on the prompt, it’s also quirky. What you hear — everything you hear — is shaped in some way by your previous experiences. This is most obvious with music, where training makes it easier to identify component parts of a symphony.

I’m torn – I have watched Laurel and Hardy clips before, and thus have prior experience with the name ‘Laurel’, but then that chap Yanni made Chariots of Fire.

But, I mean, Chandrasekaran has a final, definitive answer, right?

So what makes someone a Yanny hearer instead of a Laurel hearer? Ultimately, Chandrasekaran is curious, more than anything. “We’re going to collect a bunch of Laurel people and Yanny people,” he says. They’ll listen to the recording and his lab can look at their brain waves. Maybe we’ll find out in a few years…