Results: Yanny or Laurel: Which Do You Hear?

Another internet debate has been circulating -- you may remember the dress debate of several years ago. In February of 2015, Scottish musician Caitlin McNeill posted a photo of a washed out dress and a simple question: "Is this dress white and gold or blue and black?" Now, the latest is "what do you hear -- Yanny or Laurel? Listen to this clip and you decide. You only have to listen to the first few seconds of this clip, and ignore the rest. What do you hear?

This audio illusion, which went viral after first appearing on Reddit, has the internet torn. 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. 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 some older people could only hear Laurel, but younger ones could hear Yanny. It's a phenomenon you can mimic on a computer. If you remove all the low frequencies, you hear Yanny. If you remove the high frequencies, you hear Laurel. This clip has done that for you. You should now hear both Yanny and Laurel as the clip moves through frequencies. Most sounds — including L and Y, which are among the ones at issue here — are made up of several frequencies at once. So the problems with perception might have something to do with that. Do you enjoy things like this?