You remember where you were. It was May 2018. The internet was suddenly screaming about a muddy, low-quality audio clip. To some, it was a deep, gravelly voice saying "Laurel." To others, it was a high-pitched, almost robotic "Yanny."
It felt like a glitch in the Matrix.
How can two people sit in the same room, listen to the same phone speaker, and hear two completely different words? It wasn't a prank. People weren't lying for attention. Your brain was actually lying to you.
The Secret Origin of the Yanny or Laurel Sound
The whole thing started with a high school student in Georgia named Katie Hetzel. She was studying for a literature test and looked up the word "laurel" on Vocabulary.com. When she hit the play button, she didn't hear the word she was looking at. She heard "Yanny."
She posted it to Instagram. It moved to Reddit. Then a YouTuber named Cloe Feldman tweeted it, and suddenly the entire world was divided.
The actual voice belongs to Jay Aubrey Jones, a Broadway singer who recorded about 36,000 words for the site back in 2007. He recorded it in a home studio. It was meant to be a perfect, clear pronunciation of a wreath made of bay leaves.
But something happened.
The viral version wasn't the original file. It was a re-recording of the audio playing through speakers, which introduced background noise and "distorted" the frequencies. This distortion created a perfect storm for an auditory illusion.
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Why Your Brain Chose a Side
Technically, both words are there. Seriously.
If you look at a spectrogram—a visual map of sound frequencies—the energy for "Laurel" sits in the lower frequencies. The energy that sounds like "Yanny" is hidden in the higher frequencies.
The Frequency Fight
The reason you hear one over the other often comes down to three things:
- Your Hardware: Tiny phone speakers or cheap earbuds emphasize higher frequencies. This makes you much more likely to hear "Yanny." If you have a subwoofer or high-end headphones with heavy bass, "Laurel" usually wins.
- Your Age: This is the part that creeps people out. As we get older, we naturally lose our ability to hear high-frequency sounds. This is called presbycusis. Most older adults hear "Laurel" because their ears literally can't pick up the "Yanny" data anymore.
- Your Brain's "Best Fit": Your brain hates ambiguity. When it receives a messy signal, it searches its "dictionary" for the closest match. Because "Yanny" isn't even a real word (unlike Laurel), some brains work harder to filter the noise until they find a pattern they recognize.
The Science of Priming
Psychology plays a massive role here too.
If you look at the word "Yanny" while listening, you are significantly more likely to hear it. It’s called visual priming.
Researchers at MIT and other institutions found that they could flip a person’s perception just by changing the pitch of the clip. If you drop the pitch by about 30%, almost everyone hears "Yanny" because the high-frequency info is moved down into a range where our ears are more sensitive.
It’s basically the "The Dress" (black and blue or white and gold?) but for your ears.
It Isn't Just a Fun Party Trick
While it seems like just another meme, the yanny or laurel sound actually taught neuroscientists a lot about how we process speech in noisy environments. It shows that "hearing" isn't just a passive recording; it’s an active construction by your brain.
Honestly, the most fascinating part is how defensive we get. We trust our senses so much that we assume the other person must be joking. But they aren't. Their reality is just tuned to a different frequency than yours.
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How to Force Your Brain to Swap
If you’ve only ever heard one version, try these steps to hear the "other" word:
- To hear Laurel: Cup your hands over your ears or turn the treble all the way down on your equalizer. Focus on the lower, thudding sounds of the voice.
- To hear Yanny: Listen through a very small, tinny speaker (like an old laptop or a cheap phone) at a lower volume. Focus on the "hiss" at the top of the sound.
- The Visual Shift: Stare at the word "Laurel" and think about a victory wreath. Then, immediately stare at the word "Yanny" while the clip loops.
Understanding this illusion is a reminder that what we perceive is often just a "best guess" by our nervous system. If you want to dive deeper into how your hearing works, checking your frequency response via a basic hearing test app can reveal exactly which parts of the "Yanny" spectrum your ears are still catching.
Actionable Insight: To settle the debate once and for all in a group setting, use an equalizer app to manually slide the 1kHz to 5kHz frequencies up and down. You can actually "watch" the room's perception shift in real-time as you isolate the high or low bands.