Have you ever recorded a video on your friend’s laptop, or heard your voice eco back to you on the phone and cringed? Have you ever wondered why when you hear your voice on a recording it sounds like someone completely different? Well, unfortunately for us the voice that we hear in the recording is the voice that everyone else hears, and the one we speak is altered slightly. So how does this work you might ask?
Well, on NBC there was a man named Jordan Gaines who decided to discuss this strange phenomenon. It turns out that sound can enter our ears in one of two ways. Either air-conducted or bone-conducted. Air conducted sound, according to him refers otherwise to listening to something, such as a recording of oneself speaking, and that sound being transmitted through the eardrums causing three bony ossicles to vibrate and then finishing its journey in the cochlea. This structure which resembles something close to a fluid-filled spiral turns these vibrations into nerve impulses and the brain from there interprets them. The thing that we hear on a recording is therefore only using air-conducted sound.
We do not speak in solely air-conducted sound, however. We speak in both air and bone conducted sounds. Differently from air-conducted sound, with bone conducted sound the vibrations, rather than going through the long process of getting to the cochlea they are rather directly reached to the cochlea from our vocal cords. He explains further that the reason that we hear our voice differently that other people perceive it is because our skulls deceive us by lowering the frequency of these vibrations along the way. In other words, when we speak, vibrations from our vocal cords stay in our throat and mouth while some get conducted by the bones in our neck and head. As a result, we hear our voices as higher-pitched when we listen to recording consequently.
So why are we so uncomfortable by this change? Because we are not used to hearing our voice in only the air-conducted component, however everyone else is. Gains also argues that we live our lives hearing our bone-conducted, not air-conducted voices and that’s why we get so uncomfortable hearing something different. Let’s admit, it’s a little disorienting listening to a voice that doesn’t sound a little bit like your own and having to come to the conclusion that that is in fact how everyone hears you on a daily basis.
I think that there could be some controversy about whether or not that really is our voice that we’re hearing and that someone could potentially argue that there could be third variables that are morphing our voices into something unrecognizable. However, I believe given all the research, thought, and knowledge that scientists have put into how our senses work there is a very small chance that there is any misleading information about what we actually sound like versus what we think we should like.
Given all the above, don’t be too quick to make a face and cover your ears every time you hear a recording of your own voice somewhere. Think about it this way: the same rule applies to everyone. You aren’t the only one who hears something completely different when you speak and that at least should provide a little bit of comfort.
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