Selepas Blue or Gold Dress, Kini VIRAL Debat YANNI atau LAUREL pula

tanakkampung1x · Post time 17-5-2018 10:59 AM

Edited by tanakkampung1x at 17-5-2018 11:06 AM

http://theconversation.com/yanny ... -that-decides-96768

Selepas debat blue or gold dress, kini dunia berpecah pula sama ada bunyi ini YANNI atau LAUREL??

Korang dengar apa? AKu dengar YANNI

YYanny or Laurel? It’s your brain not your ears that decides

The clip, which went viral after being posted on Reddit, is polarizing listeners who hear a computer voice say either “Laurel” or “Yanny.” @AlexWelke tweeted, “This is the kinda stuff that starts wars.” While I can’t prevent a war, I can explain some reasons why this sound file has created such a controversy. Basically, the “word” relies on some tricks of acoustics. Your brain, and those of the millions of other Twitter viewers, is responsible for the rest.

This spectrogram visually represents the sound frequencies in the ‘Yanny’ or ‘Laurel’ clip.Jennell Vick, CC BY-ND

Kudos to University of Minnesota speech-language researcher and professor Ben Munson for his original analysis explaining how the acoustic file can lead listeners to one of two conclusions. He used spectrographic analysis to demonstrate how the sound file might create confusion.

The discrepancy in what people hear comes down to a few different possibilities, none of which sort it out for certain. Clearly, though, one cause of its trickiness is that the sound file is synthesized, which is different than real speech. It’s akin to the synthetic flavors encountered in the candy world – think Jelly Belly Buttered Popcorn, the preference for which is as polarizing as this Yanny/Laurel thing.

Without a doubt, all this confusion is only possible because of the consonants in “Yanny” and “Laurel.” The “y,” “n,” “l” and “r” sounds are really the chameleons of speech. The way one pronounces them morphs based on the sounds that come before and after them in a word. Because of this, it is the brain of the listener that decides their identity, based on context. In this case, the sound is missing a few elements and your brain automatically makes a judgment, called interpolation, similar to how you can so easily read partially erased text.

The fact that, for the life of me, I can only hear “Laurel” is because of a phenomenon called categorical perception. Originally described in 1957 and supported by countless additional studies, the idea is that your brain naturally sorts things into categories.

For example, my husband and I can never agree on the color of our couch (definitely green, not black, by the way), because while there is easily a continuum between very dark green and black, the boundaries between them vary for everyone. While we could agree that our couch looks blackish green, there is no such compromise in the perception of speech. Without conscious effort, our brain decides what our ears are hearing. Black or green, not blackish green. Yanny or Laurel, not some blend.

Whatever your brain tells you about Yanny/Laurel, the whole controversy should help everyone understand why it’s so hard to have a conversation in a noisy restaurant or why people with hearing loss sometimes “mishear” what you have to say. Listening to speech feels like a basic skill, but understanding speech is really an amazing feat. People perceive messages using the information available, which is sometimes incomplete. Our brains also make predictions based on past experiences. Listening in a foreign language, even if you are a fluent speaker, is challenging because your brain uses predictions based on both languages, but is unduly influenced by your experiences with your native language.

This internet hullabaloo underscores the marvelous, effortless, constant work of the human brain.

tanakkampung1x · Post time 17-5-2018 11:01 AM

Laurel or Yanny: What's the origin of the audio clip that's dividing opinion?
Updated about an hour ago

Joey from Friends blocks his ears
PHOTO: We can blame Vocabulary.com for this. (NBC)
Productivity around the world took a massive dive yesterday as people started debating whether they could hear the word "Yanny" or "Laurel" in a four-second audio clip which took over the internet.

It's #TheDress all over again. So how did we get here?

Only a psychologist specialising in mass hysteria can fully answer that question. But internet sleuths have revealed the origin of the maddening clip.

In case you somehow haven't heard it, here's the tweet that went viral:

tanakkampung1x · Post time 17-5-2018 11:04 AM

Edited by tanakkampung1x at 17-5-2018 11:05 AM

(CNN)What are we to make of the latest perceptual debate taking over the internet, separating loved ones from each other, causing chaos, sobbing, grief?

We jest, here. But only a little, as we speak of Yanny vs. Laurel.
Chances are you'll be entranced and/or made crazy by this viral phenomenon—if you haven't been already. It is the aural equivalent of the "white and gold or blue and black dress" debate from a few years ago.
Should you trust your senses?

Click here to try it out - do you hear "Yanny" or "Laurel"?

Those of us who hear "Yanny" precisely and clearly can't fathom what the heck is going on in the minds of those who claim to hear Laurel, and vice versa. Auditory illusions are perhaps even more striking to us than the visual kind, but we should understand that there's in fact an array of illusions for your every sense, each exploiting the edges of human perception, where any of us can end up seeing or hearing differing things in the static.
Such perceptual illusions occupy the time of enough experimental psychologists and neuroscientists to populate a scientific journal titled Perception, which has been in monthly publication since 1972. The peer-reviewed journal will no doubt deal with Yanny vs. Laurel in due course, but in the meantime its pages offer insight into the mental mismatches between us and our world.
In one recent study, researchers showed that people can be fooled about how many tones we think we hear, based on how they are arranged, using piano and drum sounds, where the piano sounds change in pitch but the drums stay the same.

There are visual versions of the same illusion where we can't correctly estimate how many black and white marbles there are, based on how they're arranged. These illusions and many others demonstrate that the human brain has evolved to pick out patterns in the noise first, likely because that's the fastest and most efficient way to generally get things right. And once we perceive a pattern, it dominates our subsequent capacity to reason.
But our natural bias towards pattern recognition can go too far, and that can be a sign of mental illness. Psychotic hallucinations are sensory perceptions gone haywire, an extreme form of illusion where the brain exerts its own view of the world such that it becomes severely distorted.
Scientists have explored the tendency to hear voices within white noise among people with and without schizophrenia, and there's clearly a spectrum for this tendency: 9% of healthy people hear a voice where there is none (tricked into doing so by exposure to a variety of sound clips, some of which did contain faint voices), but that number triples to 30% in people with psychosis. If your brother or sister has psychosis, you're more likely to hear a voice as well - 14% in the study.

Now, Yanny vs. Laurel certainly isn't going to cause anyone to be diagnosed with schizophrenia, despite how heated the standoff is getting between the aural Sharks and Jets. The audio file is a one-off, a unique low-quality audio test that doesn't have a clear winner or loser.
Unlike the number of marbles on a table -- or whether scientists hid a whispering voice in some TV "snow" (tests which have an objective answer) -- in Yanny vs. Laurel it doesn't actually matter what the speaker said at the time of the audio recording. It doesn't even matter what color "the dress" was hanging in the store on the day it was photographed (black and blue, in person). The dress was a similarly "low-fidelity" photo.

Both of these phenomena are alterations of reality in and of themselves. These types of visual and auditory memes are tough for scientists to recreate and test. But they succeed wonderfully in putting our wiring differences into high relief.

So, why the standoff between the Yannys and Laurels all over social media, with people vociferously insisting on their sensorial superiority? Part of this bombast is simply the accepted style of social media, and in a world where many are at each other's throats over grave matters of domestic and international policy, everyone knows this is a safe space to channel a little emotion, like rooting for the home team with a war chant.
But if you're shocked by the Yanny and Laurel differences in your own household and social networks, by all means use this as a moment to reflect on what else you might perceive differently, in the political messaging swirling around us.

Illusions like this fascinate us because they reveal there is a gap between what we perceive to be true and what actually exists. It's baked into our biology; we're equipped with brains that spend far more of their energy and devote far more network activity to processing and changing what we sense. Nothing gets in that isn't dramatically altered before it reaches our conscious awareness.

All knowledge is a feat of human interpretation. These periodic revelations that we see things differently are one of the all-too-fleeting healthy forces of social media, reminding us that we have to work together if we're going to get things right.