The discomfort we have over hearing our voices in audio recordings is probably due to a mix of physiology and psychology. For one, the sound from an audio recording is transmitted differently to your brain than the sound generated when you speak.
The anatomy of the skull makes it so that if we are hearing our own voice live, we truly do hear it differently than a recording. The cognitive dissonance of hearing a voice that your conscious brain knows is yours but not automatically recognizing yourself is perfectly natural: but it makes us uncomfortable.
You're Not Alone
We're predisposed to hate the sound of our own speech. It's irrational, and it's normal. Embrace it and don't worry about it. It's worth remembering, the way you hear your voice is different from the way other people hear it.
Practice diaphragmatic breathing. Your voice probably sounds higher to you when it's recorded because it's not going through all of your internal filters. While you can't radically alter the sound of your own voice, you can practice diaphragmatic breathing to give you more control over its cadence and depth.
But because our vocal cords vibrate when we speak, there is a second internal path. Vibrations are conducted through our bones and stimulate our inner ears directly. Lower frequencies are emphasized along this pathway. That makes your voice sound deeper and richer to yourself than it may sound to other people.
People are bad at recognizing their own voice
“We get used to the sound we hear in our heads, even though it's a distorted sound. We build our self-image and vocal self image around what we hear, rather than the reality.” Birchall says this can be a particular problem for people with body or gender dysmorphia.
The actor then gives his solution: To hear your “real” voice, you can place your hands on the sides of your head — between your jawbone and your ears. “That is what you sound like to other people,” he concludes. TikTok users were amazed by the news, although many were upset to learn what they “really” sound like.
When recorded, you might hear your voice sound shallower than you're used to. This is because the recordings are not affected by the internal resonance and bone conduction that affects how your voice sounds. However, the way your voice sounds on recordings is the way people perceive it in real life.
Misophonia is a phenomenon that causes strong emotions and reactions to certain “trigger” sounds. While it isn't an officially recognized condition, experts still recognize what it is and how it can affect you.
In psychology, voice confrontation, which is related to self-confrontation, is the phenomenon of a person not liking the sound of their own voice.
It's a common phenomenon among singers and vocalists to feel like they don't quite sound the way they want to when they hear their own voice. This feeling of dissatisfaction with one's own singing or speaking voice is often referred to as “voice shame,” and it can be incredibly difficult for singers who experience it.
However, don't stress if you think your voice sounds a little weird – only 38% of people immediately recognize their recorded speech. Plus, studies have found that people tend to rate their own voices far more negatively than others do.
Your voice sounds louder inside your head than it does to other people. The reason is that the sound that you hear is amplified through the bone-conduction in your head, while other people only can hear the sound that is carried through the air in the space around you.
We can not distinguish which part of what we hear is coming through air conduction and which part is through bone conduction, because they blend together. But we can definitely tell when part of it is missing when we hear it again. And that is why we sound differently to others than we do to ourselves. It's physics!
When you hear your voice on a recording, you're only hearing sounds transmitted via air conduction. Since you're missing the part of the sound that comes from bone conduction within the head, your voice sounds different to you on a recording.
“When we then hear our own voice played back from a recording, that sound is then only filtered through air, just like other people's voices, and so it sounds different from when we hear ourselves while speaking,” Maslowski writes via email.
Misophonia is often an ADHD comorbidity. Individuals with ADHD frequently have a hypersensitivity to environmental stimuli – sights, smells and sounds. When they are unable to filter and inhibit their responses to incoming stimuli, everything becomes a distraction.
The two conditions were not found to be the same thing though, meaning that having misophonia does not mean that you are definitely Autistic.
They've heard it all before: Your voice is just your voice to everyone else. They don't hear the bone conduction part. It sounds exactly as it always has, so don't worry about people thinking you sound odd. You sound great!
Not only does it sound different than you expect; through what are called “extra-linguistic cues”, it reveals aspects of your personality that you can only fully perceive upon hearing it from a recording. These include aspects such as your anxiety level, indecision, sadness, anger, and so on.
That earpiece is called an in-ear monitor. It allows her to hear exactly what she wants. For example if you are a singer singing with a live band, there is a lot of noise onstage with you, especially from the drummer. It can be very hard to hear yourself which can make you sing louder and even shout.
This phenomenon is called autophonia. This feeling can be explained by the presence of a foreign body in the external auditory canal: a hearing aid or ear mould (in the case of a behind-the-ear hearing aid) that blocks some of the vibrations of the voice.
Before your growth spurt, your larynx is relatively small and your vocal cords are relatively thin. So your voice is high and kid-like. But as bones, cartilage, and vocal cords grow, your voice starts to sound like an adult's.