Can you trust what we hear?

For anybody who keeps up "with the Joneses", there's a audio illusion going around that is screwing with a lot of people. Apparently it is similar to the "blue-black or white-gold dress" debacle from a year or two ago that had everyone going crazy. 

If it's all getting filtered in your brain, how can we trust anything we hear? If just a difference in what frequencies you are tuned into can completely change what word you are hearing. It just makes me freak out a little in my head. Definitely makes you insecure 

https://www.google.com/amp/www.chicagotr...y,amp.html

It is a curious thing. Mostly I think it is a matter of context. It may be impossible to judge colours properly unless we have some reference object under the same kind of lighting for comparison. Similarly with audio, a single word heard in isolation may depend on whether the person comes say from Hampshire or Yorkshire, or from which country of the world. Unless one hears a complete sentence or a longer speech, one may not have any way to get a grasp of the context. The audio example was also confounded apparently by being recorded via a microphone while being played back on a tinny loudspeaker.   The original sound (see attached zip file) was rather less ambiguous.

 
  laurel - Dictionary Definition Vocabulary.com.mp3.zip (Size: 16.79 KB / Downloads: 2)

It is a curious thing. Mostly I think it is a matter of context. It may be impossible to judge colours properly unless we have some reference object under the same kind of lighting for comparison. Similarly with audio, a single word heard in isolation may depend on whether the person comes say from Hampshire or Yorkshire, or from which country of the world. Unless one hears a complete sentence or a longer speech, one may not have any way to get a grasp of the context. The audio example was also confounded apparently by being recorded via a microphone while being played back on a tinny loudspeaker.   The original sound (see attached zip file) was rather less ambiguous.

 

Now, that's interesting. Yeah what you said seems dead on the money, as apparently this all started when a student heard "yanny" when she saw it was supposed to be "laurel". So she recorded it on a cheap mic and so it all began.