![]() I used to think it could be an age-related issue. In my years of work as an audio engineer, I have noticed that younger engineers, in spite of their training, tend to have problems discerning lower frequencies.Īnd I’m not talking about the ears’ ability in picking up bass guitars or kick drums in music tracks.Įven when listening to just a voice over recording, many young studio engineers tend not to be able to clean out many of the pops and thuds that occur in the low frequency range during post-production. How do we explain why some people have this “filtering” effect in their ears while others do not? ![]() So yes, all this debate arose out of nothing but for a poor quality recording, or what some call an “ acoustically ambiguous clip”. The fundamental sound issue here is almost akin to the lack of full-spectrum intelligibility of audio coming out of the tiny bezel speakers in modern flat-screen LED TVs these days.Įxcept that the reddit audio quality was already poorly recorded to begin with. ![]() The recording on reddit was simply a sound with energy clustered around the mid to upper-mid frequency range – limited in both audio depth and spectrum. The “ laurel” audio clip on reddit was lacking in the lower frequency range for a couple of reasons.įirstly, you might be aware – a laptop speaker could not produce a decent amount of bass frequencies with clarity.Ī mobile device also could not record much bass frequencies given the small size of its microphone diaphragm. Use this neat slider tool from New York Times here to see how the sound changes as the bass frequencies are being filtered out as you push the slider to the right. ![]() When you filtered the low frequencies away, much of the defining frequencies for the word “laurel” are removed. Looking at the spectrogram below of the original recording of “ laurel” taken from, you can see the concentration of strong energy in the lower frequency range (indicated by the bright yellow regions). Those who could perceive the low frequencies would have relatively less issue identifying the word as “ laurel”. People who did not register much of the low frequencies from the clip would have heard the word as “ yanny”. The discrepancy in what people were hearing was primarily a case of how much bass frequencies that their ears were picking up. The audio recording posted in reddit was of poorer quality, likely to be played off a laptop and recorded using a mobile phone. The reason this could even turn into a contentious global debate (with even Donald Trump weighing in on the issue) started from a recording posted on reddit. Given the clarity of the source recording from, do you still have any trouble distinguishing whether it was “ yanny” or “ laurel”? Okay, pause a moment if you do not know what I’m talking about here you can get up to speed quickly here.Īccording to Wired Magazine, this “Yanny vs Laurel” debate started with a high school girl looking up the pronunciation for the word “laurel” in Ĭlick below to have a listen to the actual source recording: ( ) By now, most of us should know that the audio clip in the center of the “Yanny vs Laurel” debate was voicing the word “ laurel”, but close to half the population out there have heard it as “ yanny”.
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