Audio illusions

I hear "Laurel" most clearly one bar to the left. Beyond that it's still Laurel, just more distorted. One bar right of centre and I here Yanny. Further to the right and I get Yaylee.

It's like those moments in conservation of mixed nationalities where one side insists the other is making a teeny-tiny mispronounciation that creates a a completely different word, except now you can do it on demand with a slider. I imagine it's only a matter of time before someone spoofs the scene in Contact where they first here the alien signal and it's this...

Originally shared by Charles Filipponi

The NYT is not what is used to be, or maybe it never was. Anyway, as with anyone who loves information, I take it as it comes.

And while I was sitting in a hotel room the other day, I was surprised to see a Twitter storm involving "Laural" v. "Yanny".

People have a lot of time on their hands.

I clearly heard "Laurel" but the explanations of frequency content are trivially true. The surprise is that the terms are so different - just adding some higher frequency content (rather than modulating the lower content as well) seems like an unlikely reason for such a disparity. [I did not hear "Yanny" until the slide was on the last tick before the end on the right.]

But here is the NYT with something one can play with - it adds or subtracts some content. The truly interesting thing here is the"Once you see it, you can't not see it" thing. This is part and parcel of the brain's template business.

I can slide it over to produce "Yanny" but sliding it back does not produce "Laurel" where it once did. So there is more than frequency content at play.

Kind of interesting. #Laurel

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio-clip-yanny-laurel-debate.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio-clip-yanny-laurel-debate.html