Yanny or Laurel? Vote!

What do you hear, Yanny or Laurel? Vote your answer and see others in realtime!

What do you hear, Yanny or Laurel? Vote your answer!

Short introduction:

"Yanny or Laurel" is an auditory illusion that became popular in May 2018

The audio clip originated from a recording of Jay Aubrey Jones, an opera singer, speaking the word "Laurel" as one of 200,000 reference pronunciations produced and published by vocabulary.com in 2007.

Vocabulary.com needed someone who could read words written in the international phonetic alphabet with a strong pronunciation. Opera singers were chosen because they know how to read IPA since they have to sing in languages they do not speak.

The discovery of the ambiguity phenomenon is attributed to Katie Hetzel, a 15-year-old freshman at Flowery Branch High School, in the U.S. state of Georgia, who posted a description publicly on Instagram on May 11, 2018. The illusion reached further popularity when the student's friend posted it on Reddit the next day. It was picked up by YouTuber Cloe Feldman on her Twitter account. Notable individuals who responded to the auditory illusion included Ellen DeGeneres, Stephen King, and Chrissy Teigen. Yanni and Laurel Halo, whose names are similar to those given in the auditory illusion, also responded. In a video released by the White House on Twitter, President Donald Trump responded to the meme by jokingly saying “I hear covfefe”, a reference to his infamous covfefe tweet the previous year.

According to The Guardian, the clip was the most divisive subject on the internet since the gold/blue dress controversy in 2015. Several days after the clip became viral, the team at Vocabulary.com added a separate entry for the word "Yanny", which contained an audio clip identical to "Laurel". Its definition is about the Internet trend.