Why You Think You Sound Horrible on Recording

11-Havas%2CPetra-80015439.jpg — **Petra Havas (ISB 11)**

Deeply inquisitive, Petra endeavors to find the root cause of any phenomenon she encounters when indulging in her hobbies. One of such eccentric hobbies is recording herself (she assures it’s not because she’s conceited).
In her second *Buddy!* article “Why You Think You Sound Horrible on Recording,” she delves deep to explain an experience we are all too familiar with.

Have you ever wondered what your voice sounds like when you talk to other people? Because it sounds horrible. At least that’s what you and everybody else thinks when they hear themselves on recording. Well, I am no exception either. It makes me cringe to think that what I sound like in my amazing recordings for Chinese class, in which I always manage to master none of the tones, is what I actually sound like to people. Therefore, I no longer listen to my recordings to avoid the pain that my voice causes to my ears. One question, however, has stuck in my mind: why is it that we hear our own voices so differently on recordings than when we talk?

Sounds travel as vibrations in the air and eventually hit your eardrum. When the sound reaches a certain part of your called the cochlea, it is transported to your brain by nerve signals. This is what you think you sound like when you talk or when you listen to music. However, when you talk, your vocal chords also vibrate and send that vibration off to your eardrum. These vibrations, nonetheless, spread out and end up having a lower frequency than usual and you hear your own voice deeper than it actually is. So, when time comes to listen to yourself on a recording, you just go like “Ahhhhhhhhhhhh, there no way that that is my voice....”. But at least now you know why: because just like your self-esteem, the frequency of your voice’s vibrations also drops.

This phenomenon (hating on your own voice when you hear it) is so common that it even has a name: voice confrontation. The main reason why voice confrontation occurs, according to psychologist Dr. Silke Paulmann, is due to vanity. He says, “The fact that we sound more high-pitched than what we think we should leads us to cringe as it doesn’t meet our internal expectations; our voice plays a massive role in forming our identity and I guess no one likes to realize that you’re not really who you think you are.” Basically, we hate our own voices because as humans, we are extremely vain. Not only do we dress up nicely, wear makeup and try to be cool to impress others, but we also fool ourselves that our voices sound better.

If this wasn’t enough, there is another interesting fact about voice confrontation: it only occurs when we know the voice we hear is our own voice. Researcher Rébecca Kleinberger carried out a study where participants had to rate the attractiveness of different voices. The experiment concluded that people don’t mind their own voices as long as they aren’t aware it’s theirs; in fact, they even rated it more attractive than others. To sum it up, we humans are vain and think we sound better than we actually do.

Whether you suffer from voice confrontation or not, it is definitely interesting to know the science behind this phenomenon. Although it might look like a small, insignificant issue that only makes us cringe and does nothing more, it can still hamper some of us from doing little, everyday things. I personally felt somewhat anxious when I first started to record myself for Chinese class. In the beginning, I absolutely hated it because of my voice. However, as time passed I have learned to accept that this is what I sound like. Now I think my voice isn’t that unbearable; I have learned to think of it as awful and cringe only. Therefore, even though voice confrontation can make us feel very uncomfortable, we need to learn how to get over it and let it go, just like we would do with any other problem.