0892 – Studio ‘Voice Confrontation’

2023.06.11 – 0892 – Studio ‘Voice Confrontation’

Voice confrontation (or “I Don’t Like My Voice!”)

You may be visibly uncomfortable hearing your voice live, in your headphones, or when your recorded-voice is played back. You may become stressed at what you think others may think about your pitch, accent or diction.

As we have seen before, this is down to a mix of physiology and psychology. First, the sound of your voice that you normally hear ‘live’ is a mix: partly out of your mouth and in through your ears, but mainly through your skull bones which give you the impression your voice is deeper and richer than it is. But when you hear yourself through headphones, or on a recording, it’s how everyone else hears you, through air conduction alone, that is, only through the ears, and sounds, by comparison thinner and higher pitched.[1]

But there’s another reason hearing yourself back can be disconcerting: it’s the auditory disconnect between your self-perception and reality. Because your voice is an important part of self-identity, realising that others have been hearing something different all along, can be jarring.[2], [3]

In psychology, the phenomenon of a person not liking the sound of their own voice is voice confrontation (related to self-confrontation). So, if your ‘voice in your head’ hates your ‘voice out of the speaker’ (or headphones), then you’re probably judging yourself a little too harshly.

[1] We looked at ‘why your voice sounds different to you’ in episodes 207

[2] https://www.npr.org/2019/07/15/741827437/finding-your-voice-how-the-way-we-sound-shapes-our-identities

[3] In this 2005 study, patients and clinicians rated the patient’s ‘recorded’ voices. Patients tended to negatively rate the quality of their voice compared to the objective assessment of the professional. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2273.2005.01022.x

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