On Tuesday a clip posted by a high schooler on Reddit went viral after YouTuber Cloe Feldman added it to her Insta story and Twitter asking, “What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel.”
What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel pic.twitter.com/jvHhCbMc8I
— Cloe Feldman (@CloeCouture) May 15, 2018
This should have ended there because, for us at Gadgets, it is clearly Yanny. What ensued was the internet’s answer to a part two to “the dress” sensation where people saw the same dress as gold and white striped and black and blue striped.
That is until we joined the internet frenzy and shared our own Laurel vs Yanny test to Facebook and Instagram.
And what do you know, the majority of our audience was hearing Laurel.
We started to wonder, who are the crazy ones? Team Yanny or Team Laurel and where did this mysterious audio clip come from? Let’s just start with the good news: you’re both right.
The science behind Yanny and Laurel
Video game developer Dylan Bennett was one of the first to come to the rescue with a video that illustrates what’s going on here:
Okay, you’re not crazy. If you can hear high freqs, you probably hear “yanny”, but you *might* hear “laurel”. If you can’t hear high freqs, you probably hear laurel. Here’s what it sounds like without high/low freqs. RT so we can avoid the whole dress situation. #yanny #laurel 🙄 pic.twitter.com/RN71WGyHwe
— Dylan Bennett (@MBoffin) May 16, 2018
This audio clip is playing with high and low frequencies. The word Laurel is more dominant in lower frequencies, while Yanny is dominant in higher frequencies.
In the end, what you hear is based on the frequencies you pick up. Those who pick up higher frequencies will hear Yanny and those who only pick up lower frequencies will hear Laurel.
To be fair, Team Laurel gets one more point with the fact of the matter that the original audio clip came from the vocabulary.com page for the word laurel.
Do you hear Yanny or Laurel? Tell us in the comments below.