The "Yanny vs. Laurel" debate has been solved, revealed by the young women who started it all on the internet and watched it exploded into a viral discussion and examination that even reached the White House.
Katie Hetzel, a teenager at a high school in Georgia, and Cloe Feldman, a YouTube blogger from California, did not know each other before the "Yanny vs. Laurel" debate happened, but they are friends now, the television news magazine "Inside Edition" wrote.
Hetzel, 15, confirmed that the word in the audio clip in "laurel," which was one of the words she was researching for a school vocabulary assignment. But when she played the clip for the word's pronunciation, she heard "Yanny."
"I heard 'Yanny,' and I knew that wasn't one of my vocab words," Hetzel told Inside Edition.
Hetzel said she posted the recording to Instagram to see if her followers heard the same thing. That's when fascination of the debate took over and it started spreading on the internet this week. But it wasn't until it reached Feldman, a popular blogger, that it went viral.
"I found this post on Reddit," Feldman told "Inside Edition." "It's not my original post. … My sister is in a sorority and she said they were sending this video around and everybody was freaking out about it. She sent it to me and said, 'Cloe, you need to post this on your Twitter.'"
Feldman said she was contacted by The Washington Post and Newsweek, but the blogger didn't freak out until she saw that talk show host and comedian Ellen DeGeneres retweeted her post as well, "Inside Edition" said.
"Oh my God," Feldman screamed when she saw the DeGeneres post, according to the television show. "Ellen retweeted it. Oh my God."
Feldman said she went on a social media search to find out where the original message came from and tracked down Hetzel, "Inside Edition" wrote.
The debate had news outlets like CNN reaching out to speech academic professors to explain the differences.
"Part of it involves the recording," 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.
"When I analyzed 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," Story continued. "The interesting thing about the word Yanny is that the second frequency that our vocal track produces follows almost the same path, in terms of what it looks like spectrographically, as Laurel."
Even the White House got into the act, with Ivanka Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Vice President Mike Pence all chiming in, with the President Donald Trump ending the debate by saying, "I hear Covfefe."
The debate is reminiscent of the social media debate over a photo of a dress, where some viewers saw a white and gold dress and others blue and black in 2015.
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