"Laurel" or "Yanny"?
So apparently The Dress has an audible counterpart (it was blue and gold, by the way...).
The Internet is now debating whether Cloe Feldman's video is saying "Yanny" or "Laurel". In addition to that twitter link, the video is also on youtube, which is embedded here for your convenience, but it works better if you click Feldman's twitter link and let it play on "repeat":
I tried it on my laptop and my cell phone. At first, I could only hear "Yanny". but then I found this youtube video:
In that video, I was able to hear "Laurel" at the highest pitch. Then, I discovered some things that were really surprising.
If I am listening to the video on my laptop, I hear "Yanny", but if I press my hands against my ears, it switches to "Laurel". Then, when I take my hands away, I hear "Yanny" again. With one exception (below), I can repeat this at will. Hands covering my ears = "Laurel", no hands = "Yanny".
Next, I tried an experiment where I pressed my hands against my ears 'til I heard "Laurel", then removed them very slowly, so that the timbre didn't change suddenly. When I did that, I still heard "Laurel" even when my hands were back at my sides. I couldn't hear "Yanny" any more! (That was frustrating - I won't do that again!)
So then, I listened on my cell phone again and heard "Yanny". Can you guess what I heard when I switched back to the laptop? Yep. "Yanny".
Very strange phenomenon. What do you hear?
I am hearing yanny all the way weird
I was in a hospital waiting room yesterday, and the "Ellen" show was playing it on TV. I heard "Yanny", but she and her guest heard "Laurel". Some of her audience heard "Yanny", though. Also, my son and I listened to it together on blue tooth in the car. I heard "yanny" and @cmp2020 heard "Laurel." It's especially weird that two people can listen to the exact same recording at the same time and played on the same audio equipment, yet still hear something entirely different.
Wow that's really interesting now I want to see what other people hear
Theory: it is an intentionally engineered recording. "Yanny" = "Laurel" (+) X, where X is some injected noise at a frequency that some people can hear and others can't.
When youtube guy lowers the pitch, X is transformed to X', and everyone can hear X', so everyone hears Yanny.
When youtube guy raises the pitch, X is transformed to X'', which is at a frequency that nobody hears, so everyone hears Laurel.
When I put my hands over my ears, they filter out X, leaving "Laurel" behind.
"Laurel" came from vocabulary.com, as shown here - https://www.cnet.com/news/yanny-laurel-audio-hearing-science-behind-why/. I'm not satisfied with those explanations for "Yanny", though.
So there is no need at all for noise as-in my earlier theory. You put "Yanny" from some text-to-speech program at the top of our audible range, synchronized with "Laurel" from the vocabulary web site at the bottom, then let the differences in human perception and audio equipment wreak havoc on the Internet. ; -)
When youtube guy shifts the audio up in pitch, he moves "Yanny" outside the range we can hear and we all get "Laurel." When he shifts it down in pitch, he moves "Laurel" out of our range and we all hear "Laurel."
Similarly, my hands over my ears are filtering out more of the higher pitch sound than the lower pitch, which is what lets me switch it from "Yanny" to "Laurel" at will by covering my ears.
Here's a cool tool that lets you do the same with software...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio-clip-yanny-laurel-debate.html
The only thing left to explain is how "Yanny" snuck into the recording. I'm not buying that it happened by coincidence.