So, is it laurel or yanny?
If you ask Rachel Gutman, who happens to be a Linguist, she’ll tell you exactly why people are hearing two different things. She gets incredibly technical in her article for “The Atlantic,” but in a nutshell, everyone is right. Seriously.
She says it depends on what device you are listening to it on, the dialect you use, and if you’ve heard one of those two words before. Even the placement on “yanny” to the left on the poll visual may make you choose it first.
By the way, in analyzing the actual sound, it seems to have been made to confuse.
Source: The Atlantic