A short audio clip is wreaking havoc on the internet — the most heated online debate since a black and blue dress (or was it gold and white?) turned friends into foes.
Social media users have been split over whether they hear the word “yanny” or “laurel” in the audio file, which first surfaced on Reddit and then was widely spread on Twitter after Youtube star Cloe Feldman took the question to the social media platform.
“What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel,” Feldman tweeted out Monday to her more than 200,000 followers along with the four-second audio clip that repeats the word in a computerized voice.
Model Chrissy Teigen and wife of singer John Legend was one of the many celebrities to chime in on the great debate.
“[I]t’s so clearly laurel. I can’t even figure out how one would hear yanny,” Teigen tweeted.
Television host Ellen DeGeneres tweeted Tuesday: “Literally everything at my show just stopped to see if people hear Laurel or Yanny. I hear Laurel.”
Actor Zach Braff also sided with Team Laurel.
“Yanny?!,” Braff tweeted along with a gif of Mariah Carey shaking her head saying, “I don’t know her.”
Actress Ruby Rose tweeted that she heard neither “laurel” or “yanny.”
“I hear a robot saying “yeah me” “Yehme” like it’s congratulating itself for wasting our time but I don’t hear Laurel I used to live on laurel canyon how do I not hear that!” Rose tweeted.
The debate has sparked so much frenzy that the Philadelphia Police Department even tweeted: “Please don’t call 911 to ask if we’re hearing “Laurel” or “Yanny”. The only thing we hear is the creation of another bad hashtag. (And Laurel. We’re definitely hearing Laurel).”
But others claimed they heard the word “yanny.”
“I hear yanny… am I weird?” Twitter user @MOLT_YT tweeted.
Another Twitter user, @ayeitsjay20, tweeted: “i hear yanny idk how y’all hear different.”
Youtuber Daniel Howell said that he heard both words.
“[A]m i the only person on earth who can clearly hear that it’s saying yanny and laurel at the same time and you can just focus on either,” Howell tweeted.
Brad Story, a professor of speech, language and hearing at The University of Arizona explained in an interview with CNN why some people hear the word differently.
“Part of it involves the recording,” Story told CNN. “It’s not a very high quality. And that in itself allows there to be some ambiguity already.”
Story added: “If you have a low quality of recording, it’s not surprising some people would confuse the second and third resonances flipped around, and hear Yanny instead of Laurel.”
The professor also told the news outlet that if the pitch of the original recording is changed, both words can be heard.
“Most likely the original recording was ‘Laurel,'” he said.
The audio debate hearkens back to 2015 when the internet either decided whether a photo of a dress was white and gold or black and blue.