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Comment by tristanj | Hacker News Reader

The NYT has an excellent interactive demo that lets you listen between both "yanny" and "laurel". There is a slider of how much "yanny" and how much "laurel" you want to hear. I was not able to hear the other word until I played around with this demo.

Interestingly, after playing with the demo long enough, I could hear both words spoken at the same time.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/16/upshot/audio-...

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I had an odd experience where I would get hysteresis that depended on how fast I adjust the slider. Did anyone else get this?

E.g. if I start on the 'yanny' side and very slowly move it down, I hear 'yanny' all the way down to the 'laurel' side.

If I pause for a few seconds, I finally start hearing 'laurel', and can hear all the way to the other end too. However, moving the slider a bit more breaks the illusion.

I had a similar experience, and for a few minutes I thought the demo was buggy. The original sound sounds like "yanni" to me, but if I moved it to "laurel" and back to the middle, the middle sound would sound like "laurel" as well. At first, the only way I could get it to stop astounding like "laurel" was to pause it for a few seconds. After this happened a few times I realized it wasn't a bug, but that I was somehow subconsciously adjusting which party of the sound I was paying attending to, and then I was able to shift my attention to whichever I wanted.

Exactly!

And even weirder I can now choose which to hear! I went back to the original recording off twitter or wherever and I can now force myself to hear either at that pitch.

Before I couldn't hear Yanny at ALL.

Very very cool.

Same here! For the first time after 24 hrs I hear Yanny, I slide all the way back past 50% and it stays Yanny until much lower. Crazy stuff.

Indeed, I had a similar experience. Perception is strange.

I had a similar experience too, but I'm not positive whether it's based entirely on perception (which is certainly possible) or some kind of bug in the demo. It would be nice to save individual Ogg files at particular points on the continuum and try more of a blind test to see how much influence there is from what we've just heard before. (I guess I could generate those myself easily enough with sox or something...)

While I was using the slider on my computer, I kept a laurel/yanny video playing on my phone

=> I think I can confirm there is no bug in the demo.

Wow, I experimented with it more and it's a matter of context, just as you and other people in this thread have described. That's really striking. Thanks for confirming that it's not a bug.

This is maybe an even more extreme phenomenon (from the same subreddit that was apparently involved in making the Laurel/Yanny thing go viral this past week):

https://www.reddit.com/r/blackmagicfuckery/comments/8jxzee/y...

With this video, I find that I consistently hear whichever phrase I'm thinking of at the moment! (In this case either "brainstorm" or "green needle".)

Edit: Also, if anyone in this thread likes this stuff then you might really enjoy

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/91513-behaves-so-strangely

if you've never heard it before (or even if you have).

That's quite fascinating. I found there was quite a lot of hysteresis. Initially I heard "laurel"; I moved the slider to the right slowly, and eventually it changed to "yanny". Then I moved it slowly back to the left, and it took about 1 1/3 ticks before it changed back to "laurel". Finally I found a point where I could consciously choose which one I heard, which was interesting.

If you have the ability to apply audio effects on your speakers in real-time, pick one of the Heavy Bass presets and the clip instantly switches to Laurel.

The Yanny clip is in the high register, and the Laurel clip (from dictionary.com) is in the low register, and they've just been overlaid into a single mono clip.

I've played a little with this demo and still can only hear "yanny". I've started to doubt if I know how "laurel" should be pronounced (English is not my native language).

It sounds like Lowrall

This demo is awesome! I only heard “yanny” or “gary”, and for the life of me could NOT hear “laurel” after a dozen tries.

But after using the demo, I can now ONLY hear “laurel”.

I never hear yanny. I do however hear a drunk guy slurring Gary, which sounds like yarry, though.

Sounds like "yelly" to me.

It makes sense that we'd occasionally find things like this, if human perception does work somewhat similarly to convolutional neural nets. Everyone trains their own feature detectors, and almost everyone ends up with something that works pretty well. (People who don't end up getting called things like "faceblind" or "tonedeaf" when their features don't work for a particular thing.) So it'd make sense that there are edge cases where two common approaches get different results. You could even argue these count as "adversarial examples".

odd, I never hear Yanny. I just hear an incredibly slow Laurel.

Something is weird with this demo. I was hearing yanny the first time, slided towards laurel, which I heard, and sliding back in the yanny direction, I can't hear anything else than laurel anymore, even at the rightmost yanny position.

However, if I listen to the samples at https://twitter.com/xxv/status/996462632998711297 I can hear yanny.

Its hysteresis. Also there are 2 different frequencies. Our ears tune for particular ones depending on the history.

It's nothing weird with the demo, it's humans that are weird.

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