Step 1 : Introduction to the question "In 2018, internet users were split over whether a mysterious sound was either “Yanny” or what?"
"Yanny or Laurel" is an auditory illusion of a re-recording of a vocabulary word plus added background sounds, also mixed into the recording, which became popular in May 2018. In the brief audio recording, 53% of over 500,000 people answered on a Twitter poll that they heard a man saying the original word "Laurel", while 47% reported hearing a voice saying the name "Yanny". Analysis of the sound frequencies has confirmed that both sets of sounds are present in the mixed recording, but some users focus on the higher frequency sounds in "Yanny" and cannot seem to hear the lower sounds of the word "Laurel".