Which one is it? Yanny or Laurel?

GOLDEN TRIANGLE, Miss. (WCBI) – It’s a short audio clip, but it’s stirring debate across the country.

It comes down to a simple question: “Do you hear Yanny or Laurel?”

The answer is causing people to disagree about which name they hear.

It seems to be a split vote across the country, so far.

Experts say the hearing debate all comes down to science and how we’re able to hear frequencies.

Yanny or Laurel?

Which one is it?

“Laurel, Laurel. Laurel,” says Marcus Lagronn.

“How do you hear Laurel out of that? That’s, you don’t hear Laurel,” says Tyler Oakley.

“What do you hear? ‘Definitely Laurel.’ ‘Laurel?’ Laurel, it’s not Yanny at all,” says Melissa Atkins.

Let’s hear it again.

“What they’ve actually done, is they’ve recorded both words at the same time, but Yanny is actually at a higher frequency and Laurel is at a lower frequency, so that’s why some people are actually hearing Yanny versus Laurel,” says OCH Regional Medical Center Speech Language Pathologist, Lori Windle.

Windle hears Yanny and says she’s never heard Laurel in the recording.

Besides frequencies causing people to hear either Yanny or Laurel, she also thinks how our brains are wired, and hearing what you want or expect to hear, could also be why some hear one over the other, or even hear both.

“Some people’s hearing might be so good that they can start to detect the lower frequencies of Laurel and start to pick up on that, as well. That’s why some people may be able to switch between the two.”

Windle believes the debate has gone viral because people can’t imagine how others aren’t hearing things the same way that they hear them.

Which is why she thinks the “Yanny or Laurel” debate is a good thing.

“People may not always be able to hear things the way that you’re hearing. So, it’s really good to have that awareness and be able to go back and re-state something and be a little bit more aware of, you know, it might not be them just not listening to you, it might be that they’re not hearing you, you know, not really processing the information the same way that you are.”

What do you hear?

We want to know and see your answers!