Your ears are lying to you
Why your voice doesn't sound how you think it does
Hello!
Does the sound of your own voice recorded—speaking or singing— make you cringe? Well, join the club!
I have to stifle my smile at the looks of horror on the faces of my singing students when they hear themselves for the first time. I try to ease them into it with recordings of their speaking voices first, because I remember what it was like. The first time I heard a recording of my own voice I thought I sounded like Mickey Mouse, squeaky and high-pitched 🐭
Clearly, how we hear our own voice is not how everyone else does. When you speak or sing, sound travels through the air to reach other people’s ears. But as far as your own ears are concerned, the sound travels through your skull bones and directly to your inner ear.
This is called bone conduction—as opposed to air conduction—and it’s an internal vibration that tends to emphasise lower frequencies. This makes your voice sound richer and deeper than as heard by other people.
Resonance also has a role to your play. Your vocal cords, which are also known as vocal folds and are located within your larynx (voice box) in your throat, resonate, producing sound waves that vibrate within your skull. This amplifies your voice, also contributing to that fuller and richer sound that you get to experience (and nobody else does).
Plus, there’s the very understandable fact that we are very used to the sound of our own voice, considering we hear it all the time, and can’t conceive of it sounding any other way. It’s part of who we are, and it’s rather unsettling to have this challenged.
To read more about the discrepancy between the voice we know and the one everyone else does, go to Why your recorded voice sounds strange and Why does my voice sound different.
Let’s experiment!
To help my students get ready to hear their voices as they are out in the big wide world, I always show them a few different ways to experiment with the sound they hear, by changing the way the sound waves reach their eardrums.
These exercises amplify certain frequencies and dampen others, and provide an inkling that there’s more than one way to hear something.
Forward cupping: put your hands behind your ears and cup them and then speak, hum, or sing. This directs the sound forward and amplifies it, and gives you a little bit of an idea of how others hear you.
Backwards cupping: this time, cup your ears from the front, with the palms of your hands facing backwards. This reduces the level of background noise, and makes it easier to hear more of the internal resonance and vibrations.
Cover your ears with both hands; you can experiment with how tightly you cover them, and you can also experiment with different types of headphones or ear plugs.
Cover one ear!
Talk into a box!
Put your head on a table and hum or sing. You’ll feel vibrations that will enhance the bone conduction effect.
Use a stethoscope to ‘hear’ your voice. Place it next to your throat, chest, and so on, to focus on internal vibrations.
And, finally: use the voice recorder on your phone to record yourself humming, reciting a poem, or singing something simple. This will help you get used to how your voice sounds without bone conduction. You’ll also notice a different depending on whether you listen back with speakers or headphones.
There you have it, just a few ways to find out if you sound more like Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck 🦆
And just know that I still sometimes find myself taken aback when I hear a recording of my own voice, even after all this time. Is that really me??
If you’d like to hear how I really sound, go to Kate Paine Sings 🎵😉
Let me know if you enjoyed this post! And let me know if there's anything you're curious about or would like me to explore further. You can comment on this post or send me a message at katepainediscoveringmusic@substack.com ❤️
This is so smart, and so revealing. I love the way you've explained this