"Laurel" Is Winning the Latest Internet Debate, Even Though "Yanny" Is Quite Obviously Correct

The internet has found its new "dress", and this time, it’s just a noise.

On Sunday, a Redditor posted an audio clip asking, "What do you hear!?!" offering two options: "Yanny" or "Laurel".

Well, it took just two days for the denizens of the web to turn the aural experiment into cause for social media warfare, making Twitter even more of a Thunderdome than it already was.

it's so clearly laurel. I can't even figure out how one would hear yanny.

— christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) May 15, 2018

I hear #yanny so clearly... but if I listen closely I can hear a deep quiet ghost saying #laurel.... so there... anyone else hear both?

— Emmy Rossum (@emmyrossum) May 16, 2018

There are multiple theories as to why some people hear "Laurel" and why others hear "Yanny". Mashable points to the fact that the "amplitude of the clip, frequencies heard, and the speaker used to play back the audio" can affect the final result.

Also, it’s believed older people struggle to hear higher frequencies, which means they’re more inclined to interpret the noise as the lower-register "Laurel". (Cut to a bunch of 40-year-olds suddenly saying that they can actually hear "Yanny" too. Sure, gramps.)

For this reason, there’s no one true answer to the question. Still, Google has weighed in with the closest thing to hard data that we’ve got: search results.

Turns out, in the United States, "Laurel" is absolutely demolishing "Yanny".

In Australia, the race is a bit closer, but "Laurel" is indeed pulling ahead. Which makes sense. We do have an ageing population after all…

So, there you go. Most people seem to be hearing "Laurel", even though the noise is quite clearly "Yanny". 

We're just going to leave this link right here.

Photo: Universal Pictures