0595 – Why We Sound Different In Our Headphones

2022.08.18– 0595 – Why We Sound Different In Our Headphones

Self-feedback

Your voice is very personal to you – get used to hearing it, learn to like it – but be aware of what you need to do to improve it. And then practice!

Why do we sound different when we listen to a recording of ourselves?

It’s to do with the way we usually hear ourselves.

When we speak, we hear our own voice two different ways at the same time, one slightly behind the other (out of phase).

Convectively (through the air) – as the sound energy from your mouth, bounces around the room and then in to your ears where it vibrates the ear drum and small ear bones, which in turn transmit the sound vibrations to the cochlea, which stimulates nerve axons that send the auditory signal to the brain.

And

Conductively - through your bones and muscles of your head, neck and ear – which travels slower and is has much more bass. If you cover your ears and talk, all you hear is this version.

So, when you combine both of these sounds, it’s the voice you are used to hearing, what you consider to be how you sound.

But when we play back a recording, we only hear yourselves one way, through our ears, the convective version of your voice, which sounds much more trebly and mid-range. To put it another way people generally think their voice is deeper and richer than it actually is to others.

And that’s why you dislike your own voice the first time you hear it back – it’s not like you usually hear yourself or consider how you sound to others. And yet this is the only way everyone else has ever heard you.

This ‘new voice’ exposes a difference between your self-perception and reality and can be jarring because you suddenly realize other people have been hearing something else all along: you are not how you thought you were. It’s not necessarily a worse version, but it’s certainly a different one.

A study published in 2005[1] had patients record and then listen back to their voices and rate them. Clinicians also rated the voices. Researchers found that patients tended to more-negatively rate the quality of their recorded voice, compared with the objective assessments of clinicians. So, if you don’t like the sound of your own recorded voice, don’t be too harsh on yourself. Others most likely think it’s fine. It’s all they’ve ever heard you sound like.

It is very difficult to know how you sound without listening to a recording. It is not ego-tripping; it is a sensible and professional monitoring of your performance.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2273.2005.01022.x

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