White House joined the Yanny vs Laurel frenzy with a cheeky video
You've probably lost many friends in the last two days over the audio clip that has drawn battle-lines across the Internet. The
Yanny vs Laurel debate has now reached The White House - and it's a divided house as the staff cannot agree on what the audio clip actually says. In a cheeky clip posted on Twitter, White House staff argued over Yanny and Laurel.
The clip opens with White House adviser - and first daughter - Ivanka Trump declaring the word is "so obviously Laurel", followed by many others who agree with her.
Presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway too echoes it's Laurel but jokes she could change her answer and say Yanny. We see what you did there.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders drops a "fake news" retort in the video. Vice-President Mike Pence too weighs in on the heated Internet debate. He's Team Yanny, guys.
But a surprise appearance by POTUS puts an end to the disagreement. He hears '
covfefe', a word a invented last year in a cryptic tweet.
Watch the video: The audio snippet with just two syllables ignited an internet meltdown, dividing social media users into staunchly opposed camps: do you hear "Yanny" or "Laurel?"
The collective sensory experiment causing a Twitter tizzy mushroomed from a short audio clip originally published by a high school student on Reddit.
Roland Szabo, 18, said he recorded the seemingly innocuous audio from a vocabulary website while doing a project for his school in the US state of Georgia.
He played it for his peers, who disagreed over whether the syllables formed "Yanny" or "Laurel."
Intrigued, Szabo sent it to a friend who posted the clip on Instagram and created a poll that quickly went viral, triggering a mass debate that has spread internationally.
Celebrities too added to the frenzy, including namesake artist Yanni whose saw massive surge in online searches for his name after the madness, according to
Google Trends.
- Brain game -Poppy Crum, chief scientist at Dolby Labs in San Francisco, said the environment in which one listens, including whether headphones or a speaker are used, affects the intensity of the frequencies, and hence what one hears.
"When there is more energy towards the mid and higher frequencies, people tend to hear 'Yanny'. When the low frequencies are more emphasized, people will hear 'Laurel'," Crum said.
She added that our brains want to "categorize" the elements of speech when they are ambiguous, as in this case passing them either into the "Laurel" box or "Yanny" box.
In addition, perception can be influenced by multiple factors such as age, sex or native language of the listener, she explained.
"There really isn't a true reality, there is only our perceptual reality," Crum said.
So, what do you hear? Laurel or Yanny?Click for more
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