This Recording That Says Either ‘Yanny’ or ‘Laurel’ Is Tearing the Internet Apart
Which do you hear?
![lauren-yanny-promo](https://www.maxim.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/lauren-yanny-promo.jpg?w=788&h=444&crop=1)
Three years after the “is it gold or blue?” dress debacle, the Internet has been thrown into another fiery debate—on whether this recording of a computer-generated voice is saying “Yanny” or “Laurel.”
Have a listen for yourself.
What do you hear?! Yanny or Laurel pic.twitter.com/jvHhCbMc8I
— Cloe Feldman (@CloeCouture) May 15, 2018
Nobody can agree, and everyone is losing their damned minds, especially Chrissy Teigen.
it's so clearly laurel. I can't even figure out how one would hear yanny.
— chrissy teigen (@chrissyteigen) May 15, 2018
I feel like yannies are LYING FOR ATTENTION
— chrissy teigen (@chrissyteigen) May 15, 2018
It’s Yanny.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) May 16, 2018
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
https://twitter.com/RonanFarrow/status/996751236811640832
the internet will NOT fool me like this again.. it’s YANNY
— mario selman (@MarioSelman) May 16, 2018
Professor David Alais from the University of Sydney told The Guardian it’s a matter of perception… and how the brain processes sensory input.
“If there is little ambiguity, the brain locks on to a single perceptual interpretation,” Alais explained. “Here, the Yanny/Laurel sound is meant to be ambiguous because each sound has a similar timing and energy content – so in principle it’s confusable.”
“All of this goes to highlight just how much the brain is an active interpreter of sensory input, and thus that the external world is less objective than we like to believe.”
Mind blown!