Let the debate cease and the gloating begin.
If you’ve spent the past couple of days arguing with your friends about whether the recording below says “Yanny” or “Laurel,” one of you was right.
What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel pic.twitter.com/jvHhCbMc8I
— Cloe Feldman (@CloeCouture) May 15, 2018
The tweet, posted by Cole Feldman of California, went insanely viral after she posted it on Monday evening, wracking up a ton of likes and retweets and sparking debate all over the internet.
“I posted it on Twitter,” she told InsideEdition.com. “I didn’t think much of it and I woke up the next morning to all these mentions and tweets from celebrities and different news outlets and I saw this tweet basically blew up.”
Alex Trebek rang in to say he heard “Yanny”.
#Yanny pic.twitter.com/0Mdl1wuA6u
— Jeopardy! (@Jeopardy) May 17, 2018
Ellen DeGeneres heard “Laurel”.
Literally everything at my show just stopped to see if people hear Laurel or Yanny. I hear Laurel. https://t.co/efWRw1Gj0L
— Ellen DeGeneres (@EllenDeGeneres) May 15, 2018
And, naturally, Yanni had to weigh in.
The reaction you make when people think it’s Laurel and not Yanny… #YanniToBeExact pic.twitter.com/Zp1hbvK2AP
— Yanni (@Yanni) May 16, 2018
— Yanni (@Yanni) May 16, 2018
There were countless articles written about the subject. Linguist and audio experts were consulted, and they seemed to agree that the difference in what people were hearing had to do with the frequency of the clip. For instance, some people heard different words depending on whether they listened to it on headphones or on speakers. The New York Times even created a tool that let you play with the pitch of the clip.
Now, Cole Feldman has explained how she found the clip and what it was intended to say.
Feldman found the post on Reddit and decided to track down the original poster to see what prompted her to post the video.
“Her name is Katie,” Feldman told Inside Edition. “She emailed me and we have been talking. It was her vocabulary project and she was playing the word out loud and ended up coming up with this phenomenon.”
“I heard ‘Yanny’ and I knew that wasn’t one of my vocab words,” Hetzel said. “So I had my friend… listen to it, and he heard ‘Laurel.’”
That’s right, the word is “Laurel” and you can hear the original recording on Vocabulary.com.
A laurel is “a wreath word on the head, usually as s symbol of victory.” Which means anyone who thought the word was “laurel” all along can go out and buy themselves one.
Everyone else can console themselves with this clip:
yanny or laurel pic.twitter.com/1PfV90qy03
— SungWon Cho (@ProZD) May 16, 2018
READ MORE:
- Yanni finally weighs in on the Yanny-Laurel debate
- People can’t tell if this audio clip says ‘Yanny’ or ‘Laurel’
- This one tweet probably sums up everyone’s feeling about the Yanny/Laurel debate by now
H/T Inside Edition
