On Tuesday internet was torn in two teams – Team Yanny and Team Laurel after a mysterious audio clip was doing rounds on social media. First posted on Reddit, the audio clip soon became viral on Twitter. Celebs like Ellen DeGeneres and JJ Watt were also talking about it. The talks were sparked after 20-year-old Instagram influencer and self-described YouTuber named Chloe Fledman from Florida shared an audio clip on social media asking what they heard. Why were people hearing two different words from a single audio clip? There’s a simple explanation for why people perceive one thing so differently and science can explain it.

An 18-year-old high school student in Lawrenceville, Georgia, Roland Szabo was the first to post the audio clip on Reddit, where it quickly took off. The clip was recorded from a vocabulary website playing through the speakers on a computer. It spread like wildfire after Chloe posted it on Twitter.

Chloe Fledman’s Post on Twitter

Here is the scientific explanation to why people are hearing two different words. “Part of it involves the recording,” said Brad Story, Professor of Speech, Language and Hearing at The University of Arizona. “It’s not a very high quality and that in itself allows there to be some ambiguity already.” He also said that you need to consider the different ways people are listening to the audio – through mobile phones, headphones, tablets, etc.

Humans typically pay attention to three different frequencies when they’re listening to speech. Story recorded himself saying ‘Yanny’ and ‘Laurel’ for comparison. Story said, “When I analysed the recording of Laurel, that third resonance is very high for the L. It drops for the R and then it rises again for the L. The interesting thing about the word Yanny is that the second frequency that our vocal track produces follows almost the same path, it terms of what it looks like spectrographically, as Laurel.” What does this mean? “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,” said Story.

So, if you’re hearing ‘Laurel’ you’re likely picking up on the lower frequency. If you hear ‘Yanny’ you’re picking up on the higher frequency. Story also added that if you change the pitch of the original recording you can hear both words. “Most likely the original recording was ‘Laurel’,” he said. So, team Laurel wins and whoever got that right can rightfully brag about it.

Laurel and Yanny debate was an audio version of ‘The Dress’ – a photo that went viral in 2015 when no one could agree whether the garment was white and gold or blue and black. This just shows that people on internet will debate on anything and everything and hence it becomes viral.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on May 18, 2018 12:27 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).