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This audio clip is tearing the internet apart. Like that dress, but this time it’s your ears

John Plunkett. Updated May 16th, 2018

This audio clip is going to be impossible to avoid today so we might as well get it over with, right?

It’s a bit like that dress that people saw in different colours but instead of your eyes, you’ve got to use your ears.

Here goes …

We got ‘Yanny’ and we reckon we could listen to it a million times and never hear ‘Laurel’.

Except …

And Stephen Fry’s definitely got a bigger brain that us so everything we think is true is probably wrong.

At least we weren’t alone in our confusion.

There was one thing everyone could agree on, at least. It reminded everyone of this.

And if you really want to know more about the science of it, then there’s a whole bunch of stuff here.

Here’s a little bit from the good people of The Verge.

“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.”

And there’s a video explainer here.

Last word (almost) to Stephen Fry.

Yanny. Yanny. Yanny …

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