Hear both Yanny and Laurel with this online tool
Listen to both sides of the debate.
- Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings
Yes, we're still talking about this, the disputed mystery audio clip that sounds like different things to different people. While there's no definitive answer to why some people hear different things in the Yanny or Laurel clip, The New York Times has posted a simple tool that lets you hear the original audio filtered in different ways.
The tool, found here, takes the controversial clip and applies frequency filters to it, emphasizing the lower frequencies on the Laurel end and the higher frequencies on the Yanny end, making it easier to hear both. The origin of the clip itself is a poor recording of a roboticized pronunciation guide for the word "laurel" from vocabulary.com.
There are overlapping scientific explanations for the phenomenon, including the hearing range of individuals, the poor quality of the original recording, and the frequency reproduction ranges of different types of speakers and headphones.
The debate even engulfed the CNET office with several of our team members weighing in for our local CBS station's evening news. You can see that clip above, which amazingly, sounded like "Yanny" to me while we were shooting it in the CNET Labs, but sounded like "Laurel" when I watched this segment on TV later that day,