Anyone who hears their own voice for the first time in a video, audio recording, or other similar situation is sometimes less than thrilled. After all, unless we're a voice actor with professional training and a convincing tone, we've all turned up our nose at one time or another.
Don't worry, you're not alone.
Let's start with this: when we hear the sound of our own voice as we speak, our brain perceives it in a different way than our environment.
The reason for the different perception is that when we speak, we don't hear our own voice exclusively through the external auditory canal like our fellow human beings, but also through the inner and middle ear.
"When we talk, it's as if everyone else hears the sound through loudspeakers, but we hear it through a cavity complex in our head."
Martin Birchall,
University College London
For the altered sound of our inner voice, our cranial bones are the decisive factor. When we make sounds, sound waves passesl through these bones to the inner ear. In the so-called "bone sound," the sound frequency travels from the larynx through the skull bone to the eardrum. Through this process, one's own voice usually sounds deeper and more voluminous to oneself than it actually is.
In a recording, this effect is eliminated. This is because microphones, for example, (and also our fellow human beings) only perceive the "airborne sound" from our mouth - the vibrations that occur in our own body during speech and are responsible for the low frequencies in our head are lost. That is why our own voice often sounds strangely different to us.
Our psyche also adds to this and gives us the sensations of anger or discomfort. This is because our voice is an important part of our own identity. In our thoughts, we also speak in our distorted but "familiar" voice, on which our self-image is based. If this expectation is then not fulfilled in a recording, we have the feeling that we are not really who we think we are.
And because the sound is initially very unfamiliar, many don't like the sound of their own voice.
But there is good news: You can get used to this discrepancy, because the acceptance of your own voice can be trained! This is something that professional speakers have ahead of us - they are used to hearing their voice constantly from the outside and thus perceive it as natural. The more often you listen to your own voice on recordings, the more you get used to it and the more you will like it.
Conclusion: It is therefore not at all a matter of evaluating one's own voice, but first of all of recognizing that this voice is always recognized as natural by the others anyway. The rest is then only a matter of habit. According to the motto: Often heard becomes normality.
Fun fact: In a 2013 study, participants rated several recorded voice samples. But they didn't know that their own voice had been mixed in with them. They rated these higher in pitch than their own, precisely because they did not recognize them as having been produced by themselves. Overall, only 38 percent of all people succeed in immediately recognizing their own voice on recordings!