Wow, that is so weird! Listening to it both ways, you'd swear it was a different recording. They don't even have the same number of syllables! Was this an accidental discovery? Or was is deliberately engineered to do this? I looked up the Laurel vs. Yanny one, and it didn't work for me at all. All I could hear was Laurel. Tom James Propp writes:
Do any of you (all of you) know about this?
It's a bit like Laurel-vs.-Yanni, but in my opinion it's much more striking. If you prepare your mind to hear "brainstorm" (e.g. by saying or audiating "brainstorm"), you'll hear "brainstorm"; if you prepare your mind to hear "green needle", you'll hear "green needle".
It doesn't work for everybody, but it works for me and for many other people; the striking thing is that most people can hear both interpretations with equal ease, and can flip back and forth between them. (As opposed to Laurel vs. Yanni, where I think most people find one interpretation dominates the other.)
The reason I'm asking is that I'd like to devise a magic trick in which I "convince" a sizeable subset of the audience that they have ESP, using an audio snippet that sounds like it's saying "heads" if the listener expects to hear "heads" and sound like it's saying "tails" if the listener expects to hear "tails".
Thanks,
Jim Propp