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The South African
It’s #TheDress all over again:

It’s #TheDress all over again: What do you hear? Yanny or Laurel?

It’s the audio version of #TheDress.

Erene Roux
by Erene Roux
16-05-2018 15:47
in Lifestyle
It’s #TheDress all over again:

An audio file has the internet divided. Three years ago, #TheDress and the color of the particular dress sparked a massive debate on the internet, and now it seems a simple audio clip with the words ‘Yanny’ or ‘Laurel’ (depending on what you hear) are dividing the internet once again.

According to The New York Times, the clip picked up steam after a debate erupted on Reddit last week, and it has since been circulated widely on social media. Chloe Feldman also shared the clip on Twitter and Instagram, along with a poll on whether people hear ‘Yanny’ or ‘Laurel’:

Some Twitter users weighed in, saying “this is still just repeating laurel yall are liars”.

But others say they clearly hear ‘Yanny’:

“Yanny….I listened 10 times and can’t figure out how anyone hears Laurel.”

According to The Atlantic, the poll on Feldman’s Instagram revealed ‘Yanny’ to be in the lead with 51% of the vote. Another Instagram account, @KFCRadio, also added the poll to their Instagram story. ‘Laurel’ was winning that one with 53%.

So why are people hearing two different things? Chelsea Sanker, a phonetician at Brown University says the clip isn’t ‘prototypical’ of either ‘Yanny’ or ‘Laurel’. It’s actually somewhere in the middle.

“The l/y discrepancy might come from the fact that the sound there isn’t velarized—the speaker’s tongue isn’t touching the back of their soft palate (the velum), as many American English speakers do when they say an l,” Sanker explained to The Atlantic. “The middle consonant is definitely not a n but you might hear one because the vowel in front of it sounds particularly nasal.

“People who hear ‘Laurel’ are hearing a syllabic l in the second syllable, which has some similarities to the vowel sound at the end of ‘Yanny’. Both are sonorants – you could go on singing them until you run out of air, as opposed to an obstruent like p or t.”

Apparently one of the more interesting things to come out of the debate was the discovery that, by changing the pitch of the recording, you could adjust what you heard. In general, people heard ‘Yanny’ more consistently when the pitch was lower and ‘Laurel’ when the pitch was higher.

But, other things can reportedly also influence your interpretation of the clip, including your dialect and whether you listened to the recording over a speaker or headphones.

Read: The internet can’t figure out if this outfit is turquoise or grey

Even some celebrities weighed in on the debate:

And the Police…

Some are trying to go viral themselves:

So, what do you hear?

Is jy Afrikaans? Kliek hier vir nuus in jou taal!

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