Yue Ling Seow
After the biggest controversy of the dress, the next divide is here – Yanny or Laurel?
What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel pic.twitter.com/jvHhCbMc8I
— Cloe Feldman (@CloeCouture) May 15, 2018
I was puzzled at how one audio clip could garner different responses, with different people hearing something completely different and it seems like the rest of the Internet was equally puzzled since the whole thing has become viral.
Similar to the controversy of the dress, science can explain why people perceive the same thing in different ways. In this case, without diving too much into details, it involves the frequency and quality of the recording.
Okay, you’re not crazy. If you can hear high freqs, you probably hear “yanny”, but you *might* hear “laurel”. If you can’t hear high freqs, you probably hear laurel. Here’s what it sounds like without high/low freqs. RT so we can avoid the whole dress situation. #yanny #laurel ? pic.twitter.com/RN71WGyHwe
— Dylan Bennett (@MBoffin) May 16, 2018
Many people (including celebrities) have hopped onto this wave, taking the chance to talk about something that has gone viral. The graph below for the number of times “Yanny” or “Laurel” was used allows us to identify the peak period of the hype. We can see that the controversy was debated the most between 17 and 18 May.
Since there are more than 500 videos on the topic on YouTube, how do we identify and determine which video should we watch? There are so many metrics which we can use to judge the quality and popularity of a video, including the number of views, likes, comments, and the number of subscribers a particular channel has.
Perhaps we might choose the video with the highest engagement, since a high engagement suggests that viewers enjoyed the video enough to like it and comment on it.
Having watched the video for myself, its high viewership and engagement is justified by the fact that it was able to explain the controversy and has demystified the issue, allowing viewers to understand the different responses.
