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Yanni laurel better ears12/29/2023 ![]() Recall that there was a lot of noise and a significant reduction in the audio signal at 6 kHz – an interesting clue. Let’s go back to that original spectrogram. If you’re a younger or more hearing-conscious person, maybe the low pass helped you understand how anyone could say it’s actually “Laurel.” If you’re older or have experienced plenty of loud noises without ear protection (or both), hopefully you were able to hear “Yanny” in the high-passed audio file. Let’s take a listen to the clip with a low pass filter at 1 kHz: Young people are therefore more likely to hear “Yanny,” while older people and frequent irresponsible enjoyers of loud music might gravitate towards “Laurel.” The miracles of modern audio processing tools, however, allow us to correct for this. So when you do things to damage your hearing like go to rock concerts without earplugs, listen to your headphones or stereos too loudly, fire a gun without protective gear, or have your “friend” scream in your ear, these sensitive cilia get destroyed.” These are also the most easily destroyed. “The most sensitive cilia are the ones closest to the outside: only a tiny vibration is needed to set them in motion. According to Ethan Siegel at It Starts With A Bang, Older people have lost more cilia in the course of their lifetimes than younger people, so it stands to reason that they have less ability to hear higher frequencies, but it is also very possible to destroy these cilia, even at a young age. Which frequency you are predisposed to hear depends on a few factors, including your listening environment, age, and lifestyle.Īs we age, our stereocilia (the tiny hairs in our ears whose responses to changes in air pressure allow our brains to process these changes as sound) begin to lose their potency. Since the “ee” vowel sound we hear in “Yanny” lives in a higher frequency range, and the “o” and “oo” sounds of “Laurel” live in a lower range, we’re more likely to hear one or the other if we’re predisposed to hear a higher or lower frequency range. When we listen to noisy audio, our brains work harder to identify patterns and interpret what we’re hearing. We’ll get into that later, but first let’s talk about noise. There are a few important things to note here, but the most obvious abnormality is that the signal drops off sharply around 6 kHz. Amplitudes of the signal’s individual frequency bands are more randomly distributed throughout the spectrum – clear evidence of an informal phone or laptop mic recording. In case you’re not familiar with audio spectra, we’re looking at a visual representation of all the audible frequencies of a given audio signal.Īs you can see, the spectrogram of this audio is quite noisy. I dropped it into Ableton so we could get a better look at the audio’s spectrogram. I started by ripping the audio from the original video from reddit. In this post, I’m going to examine the Great Yanny / Laurel Debate from an audio science and psychoacoustics perspective, because I’m procrastinating on my real work. Twitter data shows 47% of people on the site hear “Yanny” and 53% hear “Laurel.” Even CBS cares about this for some reason. Some people hear “Yanny” when they listen to it, others hear “Laurel,” a handful hear both, and everyone is freaking out. There’s a video with a recording of a man saying the word “Laurel” for. Laurel, but here’s a perfunctory intro in case you have made the intelligent decision to not pay attention to this.
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