Find out what makes this clip so ambiguous and why some hear one, the other, or both

Yanny vs. Laurel is the dress debate 2.0. A couple weeks ago, the internet nearly broke (again) with the controversial Laurel/Yanny debate.

The audio clip was discovered by a confounded high school student upon searching “laurel” on Vocabulary.com for a school assignment, according to Wired. The word means a “wreath worn on the head, usually as a symbol of victory.” However, when the student listened to the audio clip for the word, she heard something very different.

After hearing Yanny over and over, the bewildered student shared the clip on social media, which was later shared on Reddit and went viral. Thus the Laurel/Yanny squabble was born.

“It’s like one of those visual illusions, is it two faces or is it a vase?” said Santiago Barreda, an assistant professor in the Linguistics Department. “It’s like that, it’s just an ambiguous sound that you have to make a guess.”

Barereda’s research focuses on the roles of the listener and how language is perceived. Given the relevance of the Laurel/Yanny phenomenon, Barreda has made this a discussion topic in his phonetics class (LIN 112).

  “It’s from a dictionary website, from a hired voice actor’s pronunciation. Whoever made the website considered this to be the canonical, perfect English,” Barreda said. “So obviously they thought it wasn’t ambiguous, the reproduction is ambiguous because of poor recording, basically.”

One of the predominant reasons for the controversy is the quality of the audio clip and the quality of the computer or phone speakers people are tuning in on, Barreda explained. When the clip was re-posted on various sites, the original clip was distorted, causing alterations in the sound frequencies.

“It’s like if you took a picture of somebody, and then if you took a picture of a picture, and then a picture of a picture of a picture,” Barreda said. “It’s a messed up recording. If you hear the original, there is no ambiguity. It’s from a dictionary website, the original is not remotely ambiguous.”

Another theory floating around the internet for this auditory paradox regards the hearing ability of the listener. Our hearing ability naturally deteriorates with age, and over time, we struggle to hear higher frequency sounds. However, our hearing can also be damaged by exposure to enduring, loud noises. Examples of this include planes, playing music through headphones at an elevated level and concerts.

“It’s just a normal process of aging that we lose higher frequency resolution as we get older, so we can describe it as a physiological property of the cochlea,” said Georgia Zellou, an assistant professor in the Linguistics Department. “The cochlea is the membrane in our inner ear and due to the way it is anatomically, the part of the cochlea that has really high frequency, resolution above 6,000 or 7,000 or 8,000 hertz, naturally loses its ability to function as well as we get older.”

The contested idea is that the level hearing damage one has endured could determine whether they hear Laurel or Yanny. But this is not true according to Barreda. Although frequency is a factor in whether one hears Laurel or Yanny, high frequency hearing loss or damage will not affect the listener’s interpretation of this internet sensation.

“High frequency hearing loss is real, but it’s above the 10,000-plus hertz region, which is a very high frequency,” Barreda said. “I’ve never heard of anyone having significant hearing loss or high frequency damage below 5,000 hertz, and this audio clip is below 1,000 hertz. High frequency hearing loss can’t explain this at all.”

The role that frequency plays in this paradox is not the cochlea’s ability to detect it, but whether the individual listener pays attention to higher or lower frequency sound. The New York Times published an interactive tool which amplifies both the higher and lower frequencies from the original audio clip.

“Here is what’s really interesting about it, if we look at all the sounds sequentially, starting with ‘L(uh)’ and ‘Y(uh)’, in English those are really distinct, discrete sounds,” Zellou said. “Even acoustically, if we look at the phonetic signature of the two sounds, they are very distinct.”

By dragging the scale back and forth on the interactive tool, the alteration of the frequency makes certain sounds more prominent.

“[Luh and Yuh] are still similar, for both our mouths are somewhat open. They are sonorant sounds where we are creating louder sounds than other types of sounds we might make,” Zellou said. “So ‘L(uh)’ and ‘Y(uh)’ have certain similar properties articulatorily and thus acoustically.”

However, the act of hearing is not just a physical process. To ascribe meaning to language, we must use cognition.

“We use speech to communicate language, but speech is ambiguous,” Zellou said. “Everytime I produce a word, you don’t know if that was the exact message I intended in my head. This process of trying to translate this acoustic message is always going to be probabilistic. It’s always going to be a guess to some extent.”

This introduces a cognitive dimension. In play is not only the physical frequencies of the sound and the physical nature of our ears but the way our brain draws connections between sound and meaning.

“But language exists as these discrete categories in our mind, categories of sounds, a ‘Y(uh)’ versus a ‘L(uh)’, categories of words that exist because we have heard them,” Zellou said. “One thing that could be biasing people towards Laurel in certain situations is maybe the fact that Laurel is an actual, true word that exists in American English. Whereas Yanny is not, it’s what we call a nonword, it’s not a word that we use in American English at this point.”

The evidence that this is not purely a physical phenomenon, such as hearing ability and speaker quality, is that some individuals can hear both Laurel and Yanny from the same recording.

“It can’t be purely about the anatomy and or the properties of someone’s hearing resolution, I think there is also a really strong cognitive factor involved,” Zellou siad. “I have heard of these anecdotes of people who are listening to it on repeat and getting the different precepts within a single sitting. So for me that is evidence that it can’t be purely physical.”

Wafaa Yazdani, a third-year economics major, and Sonia Aamer, a second-year biochemistry major, had similar experiences.

“First I hear Yanny and then I heard Laurel, and then I heard Yanny again,” Yazdani said.

Most who heard the clip were polarized, hearing one or the other and creating an uproar on social media, much like the dress debate in 2015. But the fact that some individuals can hear both is evidence that it is a combination of several physical and cognitive factors.

“I heard Laurel first and then later on in the day I told my friends about it and I played it again, and I heard Yanny,” Aamer said. “It really tripped me out, I felt like something was wrong with me.”

The ambiguous nature of this audio clip and the many factors at play caused this sensation, possibly resurfacing unresolved feelings from team black and blue or white and gold.

“I don’t think it would’ve been as big of a deal if people were only hearing one, since you hear both at different times, I think that is what got more hype,” Yazdani said. “I still can’t tell which one it is, it’s different every time for me.”

So, which one did you hear?

Written by: Grace Simmons — features@theaggie.org

Students discuss experiences as tutors

Joanne Newens was eating lunch at Blaze Pizza one day when an employee approached her and asked if she was a tutor at UC Davis. Newens was touched at the person’s comments, as they mentioned that Newens was recognizable as the person who helped them get through one of their tough finals. It’s moments like these where Newens truly feels like becoming a tutor for the Academic Assistance and Tutoring Center (AATC) was the perfect fit for her.

“The comment that always warms my heart when tutoring is when they ask what times I tutor, so they can come visit me to ask me questions,” Newens, a second-year neurobiology, physiology and behavior major said in an email. “This comment shows me that I am doing something right in my job. I am considering changing my future plans because of my year as a tutor. I love teaching, and I love being kept on my toes by answering new questions. I am considering graduate school because I now hope to become a professor!”

Newens tutors MAT17 (calculus for biology students), but the AATC offers tutoring services across the board including other classes, such as math, chemistry, econ, physics, statistics and even writing. The AATC was formerly known as the Student Academic Success Center, or SASC, which is what many upperclassmen might recognize it as today.

According to Inez Anders, the director of tutoring services in the AATC, the number of tutors remains around 250 students at any time of the school year. The AATC also employs a handful of student assistants as well as a tutor specialist.

“The tutors support all of the drop-in tutoring and all of the things that we do,” Anders said. “Then the people who help support the tutoring program [are] our student assistants. They do lots of the scheduling things that happen, they do lots of the reschedules, they respond to a lot of the emails, so they essentially do a lot of the admin work that helps the tutoring program run.”

Although they don’t do the tutoring, the student assistants are integral in the functioning of the AATC. Ilona Salim, a second-year food science major, is one of four student assistants at the AATC, and she is responsible for rescheduling when people miss their appointments. Other student assistants help with scheduling individual tutoring, the hiring process and promotional outreach.

Nick Cumpian, the tutor specialist at AATC, is in charge of managing the hiring and recruitment of tutors at the center, as well as managing training and working closely with the lead tutor.

“I usually keep tutors in the loop with the big interactive strategies that we use here to improve tutoring and maintain a high level of tutoring,” said Cumpion, who graduated in 2017. “I’m also in charge of actually scheduling all the tutors that work in the drop in rooms, scheduling finals tutoring, reaching out to different organizations who then speak to Inez and then Inez lets me know [what] we need to offer this upcoming quarter. Then I’ll collect all the individual schedules from each one of our tutors, and from each of these I go and I schedule their drop-in and things like that.”

It’s no wonder Cumpian needs some help from the student assistants when it comes to scheduling the tutors’ work schedules and individual tutoring, as Cumpian notes that, on average, 300 students receive individual tutoring from the available tutors a quarter.

Sometimes a student comes to the AATC requesting tutoring for an obscure class, in which case the AATC has to seek out a student who fulfills the qualifications of becoming a tutor and is willing to take on the job.

“Like ARE 155, we had a hard time, for example, trying to fill that order specifically because it’s hard to find upper div students that […] have taken the course and are still going to UC Davis to work as an undergrad tutor,” Cumpian said. “Typically we send those emails out because we’re looking for somebody who has the grade in that class, has the GPA, all that stuff, hoping somebody will apply and then we can interview them and move on.”

This was how Kimberly Tanaka, a fifth-year biomedical engineering and computer science double major, joined the AATC. She received an email asking if she wanted to tutor, and since spring 2016, has been tutoring thermodynamics and the physics 9 series.

“Of course you need to know the subject a little bit, but sometimes we don’t know the answers so sometimes it’s this fun journey of like, ‘hey, let’s figure out the answer together’ and getting to pass along some of the skills that’s helped you along the way,” Tanaka said. “Often the students know more than they think they do, and sometimes tutoring is giving them that extra boost of confidence of like, ‘hey, you’re on the right track, let’s correct it a little bit, but you’re on the right track’.”

Another aspect of AATC is providing tutors for programs that pay for special student services. For example, the athletics department pays to have tutors from the AATC hold special tutoring sessions to support the academic success of athletes on campus.

One of these programs is the Biology Undergraduate Scholars Program (BUSP), which serves students with a strong interest in undergraduate research in biology. After witnessing the passion and knowledge of a BUSP tutor in his freshman year — someone he saw more definitively as a mentor — Matthew Culberson was inspired to become a tutor himself.

“Seeing him [teach], that was something where I was like ‘wow’ and I did well in the class, in chemistry,” said Culberson, who just graduated last quarter with a degree in biochemistry and molecular biology. “He said, ‘I want you to be a tutor’ and I already wanted to be a tutor, so it matched up, so ever since the end of freshman year, I’ve been tutoring. I was hired to be a BUSP chemistry tutor, and then from there, I was able to apply to the [general] AATC tutoring program.”

Culberson tutors for general chemistry and organic chemistry. Since he’s not a student anymore, he finds his weeks filled with tutoring work. He doesn’t mind though and in fact loves the feeling of purpose he gets from the job and the relationships he’s built in his past four years as a tutor.

“The little joke I have all the time is, ‘I’m leaving this quarter, so you have to be the next tutor and replace me,’” Culberson said. “I’ve found people [like my tutor did with me], but some people don’t feel like they’re good enough, or they say, ‘I get this, but I don’t know how to explain it.’ But I always encourage people. It’s an excellent experience to be able to stand up there in front of people and get a random question asked at you. It’s a good skill to learn how to think on your feet and analyze questions.”

Another student who absolutely loves tutoring is Anika Agrawal, a third-year environmental toxicology major. After having found that her job at the library was not quite for her, she was ecstatic when she received an email at the end of her freshman year asking if she wanted to be a tutor.

“I love it, it’s great,” Agrawal said. “Recently somebody asked me, ‘what is, aside from doing school, one thing that gives you joy?’ And I love tutoring. After awhile the same people come in at the same times. They learn your quirks or you learn theirs. It’s just like a ten-weeks lived relationship with these people.”

As seems to be a common interest amongst all these tutors, Agrawal loves teaching others and witnessing progress. She has developed a unique teaching style of using positive reinforcement and lots of analogies. Instead of talking about hydrogen and oxygen, Agrawal will paint a picture using everyday concepts like flour and sugar that goes into baking a cake.

“I would love to be the Enderle of whatever the new age of chemistry is at my university, that would be really fun just to get more people excited about it,” Agrawal said. “I’m a very excitable person, and [love] making everybody really excited. Even if I could get like five more people excited about science, I’ve done something right.”

Written by: Marlys Jeane — features@theaggie.org