The Great Yanny or Laurel Debate Divides Hollywood: What Your Favorite Stars Are Hearing

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Three years ago, a white and gold and/or black and blue dress divided Twitter, but now two simple words have ignited a national disagreement. Is it yanny or laurel?!

The debate hasn't sucked in just you and your friends, though, as Hollywood stars have become fully immersed in the discussion since the audio clip in question started going viral on Tuesday afternoon when YouTuber Cloe Feldman asked her followers to weigh in. Like most things on the internet, however, it appears the debate started on Reddit earlier this week.

According to the Redditor that introduced this audible oddity to the world, the recording comes from the Vocabulary.com listing for "laurel," which is defined as "a wreath worn on the head, usually as a symbol of victory."

So there you have it...it is laurel. But why do some people hear yanny?

The New York Times spoke to Dr. Jody Kreiman -- a principal investigator at the voice perception laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles -- who explained that "the acoustic patterns for the utterance are midway between those for the two words."

"The energy concentrations for Ya are similar to those for La," the scientist said. "N is similar to R; I is close to L."

That is why some users on Twitter realized that when you change the pitch of the audio file, you will be able to hear different words.

But honestly, who cares about science. We hear what we want to hear these days, and there were plenty of famous ears that heard yanny and wanted the world to know, while others don't understand how it could be anything but laurel. See the reactions from Hollywood below.

Team Yanny

Team Laurel

Undecided

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