Laurel or yanny... the question dividing UK

IT is the rather unusual question dividing the nation, and indeed the world.

When you hear an audio clip which has gone viral, do you hear ‘yanny’ or ‘laurel’?

If members of your family disagree, that may be because older people are more likely than younger ones to hear ‘laurel’.

Or it could depend where you heard the recording, as a bass-heavy car stereo can change which word you detect.

Stranger still, people who hear ‘yanny’ are more likely to hear a woman’s voice, while those who hear ‘laurel’ will hear a man.

Whichever word you hear, the debate dominated offices and living rooms yesterday, with celebrities including Ellen DeGeneres and Stephen Fry weighing in.

The phenomenon has echoes of the argument that arose in 2014 when people quarrelled over whether a dress posted on Twitter was gold and white or blue and black.

Academics have provided a range of explanations for the auditory illusion.

Valerie Hazan, professor of speech sciences at University College London, said: ‘The sound online seems to have been made deliberately ambiguous and people are being primed to hear “yanny” or “laurel”.

‘The issue is that this speech does not quite fit into the auditory patterns you expect for these two words so your brain is trying to find a “best fit”.

‘If your brain latches on to one of the high frequency auditory patterns, at around 3,000 hertz, that is going to push you more towards yanny.

‘If you pick up on another auditory pattern in the sound which is at a lower frequency of 1,000 hertz, that is more consistent with laurel.’

Professor Hazan is one of those who first ‘110 per cent’ heard yanny in the morning, before deciding after a repeated listen hours later that she definitely heard laurel. The debate is believed to have started when an anonymous person called ‘RolandCamry’ posted the soundbite on internet forum Reddit, with the question ‘What do you guys hear?’

It was then posted on video-sharing site YouTube where it was shared hundreds of thousands of times.

Fry tweeted: ‘I’m puzzled that anyone can hear #Yanny - I hear #Laurel very clearly... I can’t even begin to hear #Yanny

Chatshow host Ellen DeGeneres wrote on Twitter: ‘Literally everything at my show just stopped to see if people hear Laurel or Yanny. I hear Laurel.’

Last night it was claimed the source of the distorted recording was the online dictionary vocabulary.com. If correct, this would mean the original voice was saying the word laurel.