Laurel Or Yanny Debate: What Do You Hear

How can you possibly get “yanny” out of what is clearly “laurel”? Oh, if only it were that simple. As convinced as some people are that the word spoken in the next best thing overtaking the internet is "laurel," others are equally adamant that it’s "yanny."

It’s an audio version of the confounding blue dress/gold dress dilemma a few years ago that made so many people see red. Indeed, yanny and laurel are about as similar as blue and gold.

And like the great dress debate, people are losing their minds over it. Big time.

Though the "What do you guys hear?” debate has been popularized on social media sites like Reddit, Twitter and Facebook, the perplexing clip originated at Flowery Branch High School in Georgia, where freshman Katie Hetzel looked up one of her vocabulary words, “laurel,” on vocabulary.com.

But when she played the pronunciation clip, she heard “yanny.”

"I asked my friends in my class and we all heard mixed things," Hetzel told Wired.

She posted the clip on her Instagram account and Fernando Castro, a Flowery Branch senior, included a poll.

“She recorded it and put it on her story, then I remade the video and posted it,” Castro told Wired. “Katie and I have been going back and forth and we both agree that we had equal credit on it.”

Regardless of who gets top billing for starting this circular exercise, there was no stopping the laurel-yanny debate after that.

Roland Szabo, a Lawrenceville, Georgia, high school student who posts as RolandCamry on Reddit is getting a lot of credit for it, according to The New York Times.

So, what’s the deal? For one thing, and thank goodness for it, “you’re not crazy,” according to Twitter user Dylan Bett, who describes himself as a “serial game jammer.”

He said what individual people hear depends on whether they hear low or high frequencies. People who hear high frequencies probably hear “yanny” and may hear “laurel,” he said. But people who don’t hear high frequencies most likely hear “laurel.”

He asked Twitter users to retweet his explanation “so we can avoid the whole dress situation.”

So, tell us in the comments below. What do you hear in this clip?

Photo via Shutterstock / Andrey_Popov