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In what may be one of the most pressing issues of our time, finally, the man behind ‘Yanny or Laurel’ reveals what he recorded.
Recently, the ‘Yanny or Laurel’ debate has torn the internet apart. The audio clip went viral as internet users were divided on whether it said Yanny or Laurel. Apparently, a lot of people heard differing things.
(Though it clearly said ‘Laurel’ you doofuses.)
In some ways, this debate felt… extremely familiar, hearkening back to the dreaded blue-and-black or white-and-gold dress debate. It seems that it’s not just visual tricks that drives people crazy.
And while people who hear Yanny are objectively wrong it turns out that, actually, even sound can be pretty subjective.
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Apparently the man responsible for this craziness is Jay Aubrey Jones, who has come forward with new information about the recording.
At 64-years-old, Jones has had a long career in Broadway and onscreen. He recorded the word for Vocabulary.com back in 2007, along with 36,000 other words. Then, it went viral in the first place when a student realised he could hear different pronunciations in the same word.
Thankfully, Jones is here to clear the confusion:
I said Laurel.
Case closed!
Eh, well, to be fair he also says this:
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 realised what a brouhaha this whole thing was.
More often than not, I hear laurel. I can hear a slight trace of yanny.
Therefore, while it may be true that the word is laurel, that doesn’t negate the fact that people do legitimately hear yanny. Sound is weird like that.
On a side note, let’s make ‘brouhaha’ the next ‘Yanny or Laurel’. When I read that word, I see ‘melon’.
Speaking of looking deeper than the surface, take a look at the hidden things in The Matrix.
