Man Who Recorded ‘Laurel Or Yanny’ Audio Reveals What He Said
Now we have the official answer of what the man said when he recorded the ‘yanny or laurel’ audio and why he recorded it to begin with.
By WKBW on May 22, 2018
Now we have the official answer of what the man said when he recorded the “laurel or yanny” audio. The debate is over!
The aural illusion was first posted on Reddit and took off from there. Some hear a clear “laurel,” while others swear by “yanny”. Take a listen for yourself below.
What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel pic.twitter.com/jvHhCbMc8I
— Cloe Feldman (@CloeCouture) May 15, 2018
Broadway actor and singer Jay Aubrey Jones, the man who recorded the original audio, revealed he’s saying “laurel” in the recording. He recorded the word in 2007 for vocabulary.com as a pronunciation exercise. He told Time:
“I recorded my batch of words and I thought that was that. I thought, well, it couldn’t be that huge. Then I heard the recording again online and I realized what a brouhaha this whole thing was. More often than not, I hear laurel. I can hear a slight trace of yanny.”
Professor David Alais from the University of Sydney’s school of psychology further explained why our brains can hear two different words. He said to the Guardian:
“The Yanny/Laurel sound is meant to be ambiguous because each sound has a similar timing and energy content – so in principle it’s confusable. All of this goes to highlight just how much the brain is an active interpreter of sensory input, and thus that the external world is less objective than we like to believe.”