Originally Posted by
blaise.douros
I LOVE it when internet trends give me a chance to share obscure knowledge! *puts on square cap and robe*
The voice is saying "Laurel," but there are a lot of acoustic and psychoacoustic factors that will predispose certain people to hear "Yanney" vs "Laurel."
The "Yanney" sound is created by a higher pitch series that we normally don't notice when listening to voices. These are called formants--they're a series of overtones specific to human speech. They're normally masked by the fundamental, which we perceive as the main pitch and the primary vowel sound.
The overtone/formant series changes the way we perceive the fundamental tone: lots of overtones, and it sounds buzzy and complex; not a lot of overtones, and it sounds muffled.
Certain voices emphasize certain overtones and formants more than others; male opera singers, for example, do this on purpose to achieve more projection by emphasizing the "squillo" (squeal) sound.
What's interesting about the Laurel/Yanney thing is that it highlights certain differences in how we perceive the overtones versus the fundamental. There are a couple of factors, but here are the ones I think are most in play.
First, you're more likely to hear "Yanney" if the fundamental pitch is masked. A lot of things can be responsible for this; first, most people are hearing it on smartphone speakers, whcih are very small, and small speakers don’t do a good job of reproducing low pitches. So the fundamental lowest tone of the voice is being limited, which allows the overtone series to become more prominently heard.
Second, some peoples’ brains (mostly women, but not exclusively) listen more closely to higher pitches—it has nothing to do with better hearing, it’s purely related to perception. So even when the full spectrum of sound is present, those people are predisposed to hearing the higher-pitched overtones.
Finally, the voice in the recording emphasizes these formants fairly strongly in the back of the throat--whether it's a trick of the anatomy of the person on whom the robot voice recording is based, I don't know--but the formant overtone comes through strongly in this sound even in ideal listening conditions.
The upshot of this is that you can reproduce this effect yourself! Close your fist, and put your mouth at the little circle made by your thumb and forefinger. It may help to lift your pinky. Say the word “Laurel” while speaking into your fist (men may have better luck speaking in a higher voice), and you will hear the fundamental of your voice filtered out by the soft tissue of your hand, while the formant, which sounds like “Yanney,” will come through more clearly. You may have come across this same phenomenon if, like me, you were in junior high during the 90's, when people said “girl” into their hand, but you heard a high-pitched “doy” sound.
Notice any similarities between “Laurel” and “girl,” and the resulting sounds' ("Yanney" and "doy") similarities?
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