What would give me more of an occastion to pipe up here than the Laural/Yanny craze?
As it happens, the original audio behind all this is a pronunciation clip at vocabulary.com for "laurel". Look up that word there and click to hear it in its original form.
It all started when a student who was studying for a literature class went to the website and looked up "laurel". But when she played the word, she thought she heard "yanny". The rest is internet virus history.
Now you have the inside story that the sound was not computer generated. It was a for-real person saying "laurel". When I sometimes hear "yanny" in certain listening conditions, that sounds much more synthesized, as if by a cartoon mouse.
I loaded the clip into Audacity, and pasted the clip into a track 5 times in a row. The first one was the original pitch, and each one after that was a full step lower. The first one was unmistakably "laurel". By the 5th clip (sometimes earlier depending on my concentration) I was hearing "yanny".
I also adjusted the original clip with Audacity's equalizer to hear the higher frequencies. This also produced "yanny".
I've been recently wondering if we were in the original speaker's presence when he said it, would anyone hear "yanny"? My own observations are that if you say "laurel" a few times, you may come to notice the presence of the higher overtones that are being heard as "yanny". The particular tone color of a person's voice, as well as the number of processes the sound goes through before we hear the recording, affects how emphasized these higher overtones get.
You can find more about this at
https://www.wired.com/story/yanny-and-laurel-true-history/
to see an interview with Jay Aubrey Jones (voice of "laurel"), go to
https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2018/05/24/laurel-yanny-reveals-what-he-said-sot-ots.hln
