Putting Laurel and Yanny in context

Abstract

Recently, the world’s attention was caught by an audio clip that was perceived as “Laurel” or “Yanny.” Opinions were sharply split. Many could not believe others heard something different from their perception. However, a crowd-source experiment with >500 participants shows that it is possible to make people hear Laurel, where they previously heard Yanny, by manipulating preceding acoustic context. This study is not only the first to reveal within-listener variation in Laurel/ Yanny percepts, but also to demonstrate contrast effects for global spectral information in larger frequency regions. Thus, it highlights the intricacies of human perception underlying these social media phenomena.