Auditory perception5/26/2023 Age may also matter, as age-related hearing loss often elevates thresholds for high frequencies. We observed a significant effect of self-reported listening equipment (here and for all other claims see Supplemental Information). Listening equipment should matter, as it imposes a frequency weighting on the sound itself. This would be consistent with guesses made by internet commentators. Celebrities took up the meme, politicians, the media: at long last, the world had the auditory equivalent of the visual sensation known as #TheDress [įrequency biases varied widely across listeners, as shown by the histogram of the acoustic point of subjective equivalence for the group of people who reported each word on more than 10% of trials ( Figure 1D). Yet others could not even understand how anyone could be fooled by such a poor trick, as for them the sound clip obviously could be heard as either. Commentators expressed incredulousness, bewilderment, consternation, sometimes down to outright aggression toward each other from different sides of the perceptual divide. Some heard ‘Laurel’, others heard ‘Yanny’. Thanks to another high-school student, Fernando Castro, the sound clip was released on social media. But, as Katy saved her sound clip with presumably a low-quality recorder, she serendipitously realized that she did not hear ‘Laurel’ anymore: rather she heard, very clearly, ‘Yanny’. The website had hired professional singers to record words with a clear pronunciation. When Katy Hetzel, a high-school student, went to the website to look up the word ‘Laurel’, she could certainly not have imagined how events would unfold.
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