Ever since the Laurel/Yanny auditory illusion went viral, I had a suspicion that we are dealing with a bifurcation-type illusion similar to the "figure or ground" type:
That guess seemed correct with the publishing of a NY Times article where you can "move a slider" to augment the clip in either direction, causing either "Laurel" or "Yanny" to be more pronounced.
I admit that this article is quite revealing and educating (it taught me how I can tweak my brain into hearing one or the other). But moving a slider still seems rather artificial. For all I know they could have been cheating, actually having two separate recordings and the slider mixing them in different proportions.
Can we prove this wasn't cheating? Hands on?
Yes we can.
Some snooping around reveals that here is a working version of the original recording:
https://ia802800.us.archive.org/28/items/YannyVsLaurelVideoWhichNameDoYouHear-Audio/Yanny%20vs%20Laurel%20video%20which%20name%20do%20you%20hear%20%E2%80%93%20audio.mp3
Let's go to Wolfram Cloud Computing and run this simple program:
We see that at the heart of it is AudioPitchShift which simply shifts the pitch of the recording by the desired amount. Looks like lower frequencies emphasize "Yanny" while higher frequencies bring out "Laurel", in agreement with the above mentioned Wikipedia article.
My conjecture, based on the observation that "Laurel" is lower-frequency than "Yanny", is that we tend to hear whatever is closer to the maximum frequency sensitivity of our ears, so whoever initially hears "Yanny" likely has an ear for higher-pitched tunes than the "Laurel" guy.
That guess seemed correct with the publishing of a NY Times article where you can "move a slider" to augment the clip in either direction, causing either "Laurel" or "Yanny" to be more pronounced.
I admit that this article is quite revealing and educating (it taught me how I can tweak my brain into hearing one or the other). But moving a slider still seems rather artificial. For all I know they could have been cheating, actually having two separate recordings and the slider mixing them in different proportions.
Can we prove this wasn't cheating? Hands on?
Yes we can.
Some snooping around reveals that here is a working version of the original recording:
https://ia802800.us.archive.org/28/items/YannyVsLaurelVideoWhichNameDoYouHear-Audio/Yanny%20vs%20Laurel%20video%20which%20name%20do%20you%20hear%20%E2%80%93%20audio.mp3
Let's go to Wolfram Cloud Computing and run this simple program:
url="(the url above)"
audio=AudioTrim[Audio[url],{0,4}]
CloudExport[AudioPitchShift[audio,1.1],"wav"] (*Laurel*)
CloudExport[AudioPitchShift[audio,0.85],"wav"] (*Yanny*)
We see that at the heart of it is AudioPitchShift which simply shifts the pitch of the recording by the desired amount. Looks like lower frequencies emphasize "Yanny" while higher frequencies bring out "Laurel", in agreement with the above mentioned Wikipedia article.
My conjecture, based on the observation that "Laurel" is lower-frequency than "Yanny", is that we tend to hear whatever is closer to the maximum frequency sensitivity of our ears, so whoever initially hears "Yanny" likely has an ear for higher-pitched tunes than the "Laurel" guy.
It could have been a bit easier if Wolfram Cloud could actually play audio from within the interface without resorting to CloudExport. Still, it opens nearly endless possibilities for experiments. Enjoy!
No comments:
Post a Comment