by Anthony Licata
Quite often, people hear a recording or themselves and think, “This isn’t what I really sound like, is it?!” Most of us don’t like the sound of our voice when we hear a recording of it, but why is that? When we talk, we hear a combination of our inner voice and our actual voice. This is because of bone vibration, or resonance, which makes our voices sound deeper and fuller to us. We’re the only people who can hear what we sound like through our inner voice and our actual voice, but that voice we hear isn’t our true voice.
This is weird, I know, and you may ask what our actual voices sound like. There are multiple ways to try to figure out what we sound like to other people, and two ways are easy enough for anyone to do it. The first is to record yourself with a high-tech recording system, and the second is to cup your hands around your ears and then talk. While these are both pretty easy things for most people to do, there are disadvantages to both.
Let’s start with the high-tech recording system option. Recording yourself and then listening back to it’s not truly a reliable option if you want to know what your voice actually sounds like. Our recording voice is our voice, but it’s a recording, which means there can be other factors involved, like background noise. This could interfere with what the recording sounds like and alter the audio.
The other way to figure out what our voice sounds like to other people is when we cup our hands over our ears and talk. This way sounds a little weird, but it does work better than what you would expect from such a simple trick. There’s a video that I watched where a guy mentioned this trick and I tried it. He cupped his hands over his ears and counted down from ten. When he was counting, he slowly moved his hands away from his ears. He then mentioned that when he started to pull his hands away from his ears, he started to hear a small difference in his voice.
As I mentioned, when we talk, our voice sounds deeper and fuller to us. I think there’s a saying that goes something like, “We know ourselves better than anyone,” but when it comes to our own voices, that might not be true! The next time you’re wondering what you sound like to other people, try these two methods. Eventually, after hearing your actual voice for some time, you might get used to it and like it!
