你听到了「Yanny」还是「Laurel」？听力界的蓝黑白金裙之争
继2015年的蓝黑/白金裙子之战、
去年的粉白/灰绿鞋之争后，
最近，「听力届」的网友对决又来了
▼https://v.qq.com/txp/iframe/player.html?vid=s13391ftma8&width=500&height=375&auto=0
你听到了「Yanny」还是「Laurel」？
不方便戳视频的话直接听音频
▼
Laurel or Yanny? What We Heard From the Experts
声音“黑魔法”：你听到了Yanny还是Laurel？
Three years ago, the Internet melted down over the color of a dress. Now an audio file has friends, family members and office mates questioning one another's hearing, and their own.
三年前，互联网上的人们因为一件连衣裙的颜色而争论不休。现在，一段音频文件使得朋友、家人和同事在互相质疑彼此的听力。
Is the voice saying “Yanny” or “Laurel”?
那个声音说的究竟是 “Yanny”还是“Laurel”？
The clip and an online poll were posted on Instagram, Reddit and other sites by high school students who said that it had been recorded from a vocabulary website playing through the speakers on a computer. An 18-year-old high school student in Lawrenceville, Ga., Roland Szabo, was the first to post it on Reddit, where it quickly took off. At first, he claimed he had made the audio file himself. But on Thursday Mr. Szabo credited the students identified by Wired as creators of the Instagram post, saying he had been caught up in the media excitement.
劳伦斯维尔一名18岁高中生的罗兰·萨博(Roland Szabo)在Reddit上发布的这段音频迅速引发了大量关注和激烈争论。萨博表示，他前段时间在为一个学校项目工作，录制一个词汇网站上的音频文件。当他用电脑上的扬声器播放音频时，和他同处一室的人对他们听到了什么产生了分歧。他还说，在自己将音频发到Reddit上之前，一个朋友将它发到了Instagram上。
Social media bragging rights[1] aside, the source of the clip may frustrate some and vindicate[2] others: the vocabulary.com page for “laurel,” the word for a wreath worn on the head, “usually a symbol of victory.”
有个事实可能会使一部分人失望：这段最初的录音来自vocabulary.com网站上的“桂冠(Laurel)”页面，这个词指的是戴在头上的花环，通常是“胜利的象征”。
[1]bragging rights (n.) the opportunity to speak proudly because you have done something impressive 狂傲资本; 吹牛的权利
[2]vindicate
1）to prove that what someone said or did was right or true, after other people thought it was wrong 证明…正确；证明…是真的
The decision to include Morris in the team was completely vindicated when he scored two goals.
莫里斯攻入了2球，证明当初将他招入队中是完全正确的。
2）to prove that someone is not guilty or is free from blame, after other people blamed them 证明（某人）无辜，澄清
Sorry, Team Yanny.
Many audio and hearing experts have weighed in[3].
许多声音和听力专家对这段音频做出了分析。
[3]weigh in：to become involved in an argument or discussion in a forceful way 积极参与（辩论或讨论）
Several leading architects weighed in with criticisms regarding the design of the new museum.
几位著名的建筑师加入进来对新博物馆的设计方案提出了批评意见。
Jody Kreiman, a principal investigator at the voice perception laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, helpfully guessed that “the acoustic patterns for the utterance[4] are midway between those for the two words.”
加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校(UCLA)语音感知实验室的首席研究员乔迪·克雷曼(Jody Kreiman)猜测：“这一发音的声学模式正好介于这两个词之间。”
[4]utterance：something that someone says 说话，讲话
The senator's recent utterances were promptly rebutted by three of his colleagues on Monday.
那位参议员在周末发表的言论周一就迅即遭到了3位同僚的反驳。
Patricia Keating, a linguistics professor and the director of the phonetics[5] lab at U.C.L.A., said: “It depends on what part (what frequency range) of the signal you attend to.”
语言学教授兼语音学实验室主任帕特里夏·基廷(Patricia Keating)认为，这取决于人们接受到了哪个频率范围内的信号。
[5]phonetics：the study of the sounds made by the human voice in speech 语音学
“I have no idea why some listeners attend more to the lower frequency range while others attend more to the higher frequency range,” she added. “Age? How much time they spend talking on the phone?”
有一部分人对高频声音感知度更高，而另一些人则只能听到较低频率的声音。
Elliot Freeman, a perception researcher at City University of London, said our brains can selectively tune into different frequency bands once we know what to listen out for, “like a radio.”
伦敦城市大学感知研究员艾略特·弗里曼(Elliot Freeman)表示，一旦我们知道应该听什么，我们的大脑可以选择性地调到不同的频段，“就像收音机一样。”
“What one hears first depends on the how the sound is reproduced, e.g. on an iPhone speaker or headphones, and on an individual's own ‘ear print’ which might determine their sensitivity to different frequencies,” he said.
“人们首先听到的声音取决于那个声音如何被再现，例如在iPhone扬声器或耳机上，这可能决定他们对不同频率的敏感度，”他说。
It didn't take long for the auditory illusion to be referred to as “black magic.” And more than one person online yearned for that simpler time in 2015, when no one could decide whether the mother of the bride wore white and gold or blue and black. It was a social media frenzy in which Internet trends and traffic on the topic spiked so high that Wikipedia itself now has a simple entry, “The dress.”
实际上，这并不是互联网上第一次出现这种“黑魔法”时刻。在2015年，一位新娘母亲的裙子究竟是白金配色还是蓝黑配色引发了一场社交媒体狂潮，以至于维基百科如今有了一个专门的条目：“那件连衣裙(The dress)”。
With time, a definitive scientific explanation will probably surface, like the one given for the dress, which had much to do with lighting.
随着时间的推移，一个明确的科学解释可能会浮现出来，就像那件连衣裙一样——你所看到的颜色与光线有很大关系。
来源：纽约时报
注：中英文并非一一对应 仅供参考
https://v.qq.com/txp/iframe/player.html?vid=y1339qjml9b&width=500&height=375&auto=0
▲ SOLVED with SCIENCE