Offices are being torn apart by Laurel and Yanny. Here's why it's definitely Laurel

If you work in an office with humans and computers there is a good chance that most of you are talking about the latest debate to take hold of the internet. Forget that banal blue/white dress fiasco (and for the record, it was definitely blue), now it is all about Yanny-Laurel. In an audio file shared by a 17-year-old on Instagram on Monday night, Chloe asked whether we heard the word Yanny or Laurel?

From Instagram it moved to Reddit and then Twitter and now it has penetrated the deep caverns of the internet as every Tom, Dick and Harry in your office as well as the great minds of our society (Chrissy Teigan, Mindy Kaling) insist what they are hearing is correct and making memes to keep you distracted from your work for hours.

I bought your cookbook. I loved it. And now you betray me? #yanny

— Mindy Kaling (@mindykaling) May 16, 2018

But how are people so convinced it is one or the other? Dana Boebinger, a PhD student at Harvard and MIT who is studying neural basis of auditory perception, explained to the Twittersphere in seven parts how you are hearing what you are hearing so you can also start to hate your coworkers. She wrote:

1/7 Okay dweebs, here’s the science behind that “laurel vs. yanny” thing people keep sending me. It has to do with which frequencies of the sound are actually making it to your brain. This can be affected by several things: headphones / speakers, listening volume, hearing loss…

— Dana Boebinger (@dlboebinger) May 15, 2018

2/7 It’s a recording of a single word (there’s no trickery), but the identity of that word seems to change depending on which frequencies are amplified. Here is me saying “laurel…yanny.” Time is on the x-axis, the y-axis is frequency. Regions with more energy are darker black. pic.twitter.com/STTpzQuilS

— Dana Boebinger (@dlboebinger) May 15, 2018

3/7 As you can see, speech sounds like “l” and “r” have more low frequencies in them (shown as a darker black band in the first word below), while sounds like “y” and “ee” have more higher frequencies in them (a big black blob towards the top of the second word).

— Dana Boebinger (@dlboebinger) May 15, 2018

4/7 This video explains it well: https://t.co/349UgB3Z1m

— Dana Boebinger (@dlboebinger) May 15, 2018

5/7 You can also mess with this by pitching the sound up/down or changing the volume. This has to do with how voices work, as well as humans’ hearing thresholds for different frequencies. If you turn the volume way down, you can’t hear the low frequencies & you’ll hear “yanny."

— Dana Boebinger (@dlboebinger) May 15, 2018

6/7 But the main reason (I suspect) people hear this differently is bc different headphones and speakers filter the frequencies of the sound in different ways. Cheaper/worse speakers (e.g. your earbuds) filter out low frequencies, while better speakers can handle them.

— Dana Boebinger (@dlboebinger) May 15, 2018

7/7 And as always when it comes to perceptual phenomena, other factors are also important, and people’s different hearing sensitivities (and possible high-frequency hearing loss), expectations, attention, and all that jazz. Perception is complicated! #laurel #yanny #YannyvsLaurel

— Dana Boebinger (@dlboebinger) May 15, 2018