‘Do I really sound like that?’
People typically believe their voice to be deeper and richer than it actually is
I torture myself at least five times a week.
As a writer whose written notes look like unreadable hieroglyphics, I routinely record my formal interviews with people and sometimes my casual conversations too.
Using a voice memos app on my iPhone, I habitually click it when I think I may need to properly quote someone verbatim for a column, a story or even a social media post.
It has saved me from having to sort through pages of scribbled notes that too many times looked like gibberish, even though I was the author. Many years ago I used small mini-tape audio recorders. (I still have some of those dusty interviews.)
A few years ago I began using smartphone apps. It’s marvelous digital technology that also clearly records a person’s voice inflections, any ambient background sounds and many conversational details that I would otherwise forget or not write down in my notes. These audio recordings capture everything as long as it’s not too windy outdoors or too noisy inside a crowded room.
Here’s the tortuous problem: These recordings also capture every word I say and how I say it. It’s simply awful.
It’s as if someone else is talking on those recordings. I quietly ask myself, “That’s not ME, is it?” I also tell myself to JUST SHUT UP a few times during each playing of these recordings.
For a guy who prides himself on listening to others for a living, I seem to never shut up. And I’ve caught myself too many times interrupting people just before they sound as if they’re going to say something important or share some intimate detail.
I repeatedly tell myself, out loud, “Shut up already!” as I listen to these recordings while writing my columns. I should record me berating myself as a reminder to stop talking, but it would only worsen the deeper problem with these recordings.
My voice sounds like a
stranger, a stranger with an annoying voice. An annoying voice that sounds nothing like me. Or so I thought.
Everyone else tells me this is exactly how I sound every day. Every day? No, it can’t be. I sound like I’m going through puberty in my late 50s. I also talk much faster than I hear myself speaking.
I sometimes sound like a snake oil salesman standing on the back of a covered wagon in the
Old West: “Step right up, step right up! I have what ails you right here in my hand.” Ugh. Actually, it’s the iPhone in my hand that ails me every time I listen to those recordings.
I have the same reaction when I watch video recordings of myself, typically created for social media posts. My latest video, taken at a shopping mall for an upcoming column, reminded me how much I hate my own voice.
I’m not alone in this very human reaction, according to the science behind this auditory phenomenon.
“The discomfort we have over hearing our voices in audio recordings is probably due to a mix of physiology and psychology,” writes Neel Bhatt, an assistant professor of otolaryngology at the University of Washington.
Last month, in a guest column for the CNN
Health website, Bhatt explained in layman’s terms why so many of us become visibly uncomfortable when hearing our own voice played back to us.
“Do I really sound like that?” they wonder, wincing. Yes, they do. And so do you. Here’s why.
For starters, the sound from an audio recording is transmitted differently to your brain than the sound generated when you speak, Bhatt wrote. When listening to a recording of your voice, the sound travels through the air and into your ears — what’s referred to as “air conduction.”
Like you, I had never heard this term, so I looked it up. Air conduction hearing occurs through air near the ear, involving the ear canal and eardrum.
“However, when you speak, the sound from your voice reaches the inner ear in a different way … a blend of both external and internal conduction, and internal bone conduction appears to boost the lower frequencies,” Bhatt wrote.
I had to also look up this term. Bone conduction hearing occurs through vibrations picked up by the ear’s specialized nervous system.
This auditory contrast is why people think their voice is deeper and richer than what it sounds like when they actually speak. Our recorded voice, in comparison, can sound thinner and higher-pitched, which many of us find cringeworthy, Bhatt wrote.
“Yes!” I (silently) said to myself, nodding my head while reading his scientific analysis. This is precisely how I feel about my actual voice versus my self-perceived voice.
I immediately recalled the first time I met my fiance, who later told me my voice was a bit higher-pitched than she expected. What? I hoped I sounded like Barry White on stage. I actually sounded like Barry Gibb.
The second reason that hearing our own voice can be “disconcerting,” as Bhatt puts it, is because it reveals a brand-new voice to our senses — one that exposes an uncomfortable difference between reality and our perception of reality.
I view this as audio self-delusion, affecting how we identify ourselves to the world and to ourselves.
“This mismatch can be jarring. Suddenly you realize other people have been hearing something else all along,” Bhatt wrote, citing a study that confirms this common overreaction of self-judgment.
If you don’t think you have this problem, I suggest you record yourself while reading this column, then play it back. The stranger you’ll hear reading it is
It’s torture, I tell ya.