Does Your Voice Really Sound Like That?

Have you ever seen a video or heard a recording of yourself and thought, “That can’t really be what I sound like, right?” We’ve all been there, but it turns out you’re not being self-conscious or imagining things. 

The difference is not in your head. Actually, scratch that, it is in your head, quite literally. The reason a recording of your voice sounds different than what you usually hear is because of the relationship between your voice, your ears, and even your own skull.

Your Inner Voice

When we watch a video or listen to an audio recording, the sound we’re hearing is coming from a single source: the speakers. Sound waves travel through the air to our eardrums, which translate the sound waves into physical vibrations. A part of our inner ear called the cochlea then translates these vibrations into electrical signals our brain can interpret as sound. 

Anytime we listen to our own voice in a video or audio recording, this is how we’re hearing it. But when we’re hearing ourselves speak aloud in real time, our eardrums actually have to process two different sources of sound.

The first source is essentially the same as the above, in which the sound of our voice, which is created by vibrations in our vocal cords, travels through the air to our ears, gets turned into vibrations by our eardrums, and then turned into brain signals by our cochlea. 

Instead of originating from a speaker, it’s originating from our mouth, but the way the sound gets from point A to point B is the same. However, it’s the second source that really changes how we perceive ourselves.

As we talk and sound waves travel through the air, the vibrations set off by our vocal cords also move directly through our skull. Since they’re already physical vibrations, they bypass the eardrum and head straight to the cochlea, which then tells the brain how they sound.

These bone-conducted sound waves have rich, lower frequencies that blend with the air-conducted vibrations in our eardrums. This means our cochlea perceives a mix of higher and lower frequencies as we hear our voice while speaking out loud. 

Meanwhile, everyone else is only perceiving our voice through the air, leaving only the higher-pitched frequencies — just as we do when we hear it played back to us, resulting in a discrepancy.

Naturally, many people find the experience of hearing their voice played back and having it sound different from the way it does in their heads off-putting. Not liking the sound of your own voice is actually such a prevalent occurrence that there’s even a psychological term for it: voice confrontation. The phenomenon may even be linked to elevated levels of social anxiety. 

So you’re not alone if you find yourself cringing at the sound of your own voice, which hopefully makes you feel at least a little better about it.