Yanny or Laurel: How a 2007 Dictionary Recording Split the Internet in 2018

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Imagine you and a friend are just sitting in a quiet room.

SPEAKER_2 (0:03)

Okay, setting the scene?

SPEAKER_1 (0:04)

Right. And outside, a dog barks.

You look at your friend, they look at you, and you both completely agree, like, a dog just barked.

SPEAKER_2 (0:13)

Yeah, there's no debate there.

SPEAKER_1 (0:14)

Exactly, there's no debate. And it is comforting, really, this expectation of a shared baseline of reality.

SPEAKER_2 (0:21)

Right, I mean, we rely on that assumption just to function in society.

SPEAKER_1 (0:24)

Totally.

The sound happened, the physical sound waves hit both of your eardrums, and your brain's collected the identical data. Reality in that moment is shared, it's objective, and it's binary.

SPEAKER_2 (0:36)

And we have to believe that our senses act as objective recording devices, like when we perceive something, we assume we are experiencing the world exactly as it exists outside of our own heads. Right. So the idea that you and I could listen to the exact same audio signal and hear two completely different words is, well, it's deeply unsettling.

SPEAKER_1 (0:56)

It really is. But in the strange digital landscape of May 2018, that shared reality just shattered completely.

SPEAKER_2 (1:04)

Oh, completely. It broke the internet.

SPEAKER_1 (1:06)

It did. A simple, like one second long audio clip hits the internet, and overnight, it divided people into two entirely incompatible camps.

SPEAKER_2 (1:15)

And we are looking at the statistics from a massive Twitter poll conducted right at the height of the frenzy, right?

SPEAKER_1 (1:21)

Yeah. Out of over 500,000 respondents, 53% heard a man clearly saying the word Laurel.

Wow. But 47% of them heard a voice distinctly saying Yanny.

SPEAKER_2 (1:33)

And the defining feature of this phenomenon, you know, wasn't just the split. It was the absolute unwavering certainty on both sides.

SPEAKER_1 (1:41)

Yes. People were ready to fight over this.

SPEAKER_2 (1:43)

Right, because this was not a situation where people listened to it and said, oh, it's a bit muddy. I suppose it sounds a little like both.

SPEAKER_1 (1:49)

No, not at all.

SPEAKER_2 (1:50)

The people who heard Laurel found it physically and neurologically impossible to comprehend how anyone on earth could hear Yanny.

SPEAKER_1 (1:57)

And the Yanny camp felt exactly the same way about the Laurel camp. It genuinely felt like a global glitch in human perception.

SPEAKER_2 (2:05)

It really did.

SPEAKER_1 (2:06)

Which brings us to the mission of today's Deep Dive. We have a massive stack of sources in front of us ranging from news archives to like dense psychoacoustic research papers.

SPEAKER_2 (2:16)

We're getting into the weeds today.

SPEAKER_1 (2:18)

We really are. We're going to explore not just the viral history of this auditory illusion, but the actual physics of sound waves, the intricate biology of human hearing, and the psychology behind how our brains actively construct our reality.

SPEAKER_2 (2:32)

Yeah, we are going to look at why your ears and your brain might be aggressively editing the world around you in real time.

SPEAKER_1 (2:38)

So to everyone listening right now, welcome.

Okay, let's unpack this. Where does a reality-breaking piece of audio actually come from?

SPEAKER_2 (2:48)

Well, the origin story is surprisingly humble.

SPEAKER_1 (2:51)

Oh, yeah?

SPEAKER_2 (2:52)

Yeah, I mean, given how perfectly this audio clip fractures the human brain, you might expect it to have been meticulously engineered in a high-tech psychoacoustics laboratory.

SPEAKER_1 (3:01)

Right, like scientists trying to map the absolute boundaries of human auditory perception or something.

SPEAKER_2 (3:07)

Exactly. But in reality, it started back in 2007 with a man named Jay Aubrey Jones, who was an opera singer.

SPEAKER_1 (3:14)

Wait, an opera singer?

SPEAKER_2 (3:16)

Yep.

SPEAKER_1 (3:17)

So someone with a highly trained voice and excellent diction, but definitely not a mad scientist in the lab coat deliberately trying to break the internet.

SPEAKER_2 (3:25)

Far from it. He was just hired to record reference pronunciations for the website vocabulary.com.

SPEAKER_1 (3:31)

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_2 (3:31)

And his setup was about as low-tech as you can get for professional audio. He built a makeshift recording studio in his own apartment in New York.

SPEAKER_1 (3:39)

Let me guess. Pillows and blankets.

SPEAKER_2 (3:41)

Close. He had a laptop, a standard microphone, and some acoustic foam stuck to the walls to try and deaden the echo.

SPEAKER_1 (3:47)

That is amazing.

SPEAKER_2 (3:48)

Right. And from that incredibly simple setup, he methodically recorded a staggering 200,000 words for the dictionary website.

SPEAKER_1 (3:55)

200,000?

SPEAKER_2 (3:57)

That's exhausting to even think about.

SPEAKER_1 (3:59)

I know.

SPEAKER_2 (4:00)

And the word Laurel, meaning the foliage or the wreath traditionally worn by champions, was just one single file in that massive database.