Personally, I’m not a fan of either, so it’s always been a little interesting to me to run into people that are more averse to hearing a recording of their voice.
(Also is there a dedicated term for audio-only voice recordings? 🤨)
People see themselves in the mirror pretty often, so they have a general idea of how they appear to other people. But they don’t hear their own voice regularly unless they record themselves and listen to it, so it’s more of a surprise when they do hear their own voice.
I think you have this flipped, though. It’s more like we hear ourselves all the time, but we don’t sound at all to ourselves the way we actually sound. We don’t have a sort of internal picture of ourselves to create dissonance with our reflection or photographs in the same way we do with our voices. It’s that dissonance that makes us distrust or dislike hearing ourselves as we actually sound because that isn’t the voice we identify with internally.
I think this is changing and would change more in thw future. I’m not a fan of voice messages, but my wife and her sisters never “chat” they just send audio messages on whatsapp all the time and, at least my wife, listen to the messages she send multiple times. I don’t think she’s the only one who does that.
You get used to seeing yourself in a mirror.
Most people don’t listen to their voice nearly as often as they look in a mirror.
I was interviewed this morning on my local stations morning radio show and I refuse to listen to it lol.
You get used to seeing yourself in a mirror.
You do?? 😦
Like, actually, legitimately?
Looking at my own face makes me uncomfortable, so I typically don’t look imto mirrors straight-on.
I suspect it’s because we see accurate representations of ourselves in every mirror. With voice though what we hear normally is distorted by the resonence of our jawbone, so hearing the version everyone else does when it’s played back from a recording is alien and weird.
Might make for an interesting experiment to take picture of someone in a mirror and through the mirror (pinhole or two-way mirror) and then ask people which of the two is real and which is the doctored one. Neither are edited of course but one would look wrong for anyone who met the person in the photos.
I suspect this is basically it, however I’ve often thought similar could be said of one’s appearance; as it’s distorted by different lighting, whether your clothing’s gotten wrinkled up a certain way, the wind’s messed up your hair, or you accidentally smudged makeup or some dirt on you somewhere. Although that all is also typically easier to adjust (give or take the lighting and wind) than your voice, so that undoubtedly plays into it.
It’s easier to change your hairstyle or makeup than it is your voice. Most people also hear their voice about an octave lower in their head. It resonates differently internally than it does out in the air. A recording of your voice is like looking in a mirror and seeing something different than what you see most of the time.
I think I sound reasonable talking. On recordings I sound like the gayest, campest homo in the fucking universe.
Even though I’m gay it’s still cringe af.
It’s fucking hilarious to think I went years denying being gay but when I listen to my voice it’s like “WTF - it’s SO fuckign obvious!”
Dude same but with my Mexican accent. I know I have a tad of an accent but it’s not bad in my head, the moment I hear my voice in a recording it’s like I’m listening to fucking speedy Gonzales or whatever his cousin slow rat was.
I once heard that the mirror thing is why we tend to dislike photos of ourselves - it’s because we are not mirrored there and this unconsciously looks odd to us.
Fittingly to this theory, I know a lot of people who think they only look good in selfies and no one else can make a good picture of them. Maybe that’s connected.
Most people also hear their voice about an octave lower in their head.
Is this true? It’s the other way around for me. Well, I don’t know if it’s an octave, but my voice sounds significantly deeper in recordings than I hear it as I’m speaking.
https://gizmodo.com/why-your-voice-sounds-different-inside-your-head-1620981647
“This added resistance causes the waveform frequency to drop, lowering the pitch of the sound you hear internally”
Do you have a low voice? I’m a bass and I’m the same way. My voice in recordings always sounds lower (and less expressive!) than it is in my head.
Yeah, it’s pretty deep as other people hear it. I hate how I sound in recordings.
I think there’s another aspect that people haven’t really pointed out yet: that most speakers and microphones are trash. With cameras and screens, we’ve gotten really good at capturing real life in pictures and then displaying those pictures. But microphones and speakers are fundamentally limited by physics. And most microphones and speakers that everyday people would have access to are limited by physics to be awful at picking up sounds accurately.
Try listening to the same song on a desktop speaker vs. earphones. Earphones just simply don’t reproduce the song to the same quality as the desktop speakers. They are terrible at reproducing low tones, and the balance is usually wack. Or, for instance, try talking to a friend via a Zoom call vs. talking in person. You can pretty easily tell the difference. You can get expensive equipment to capture and reproduce sounds more accurately, which is what streamers and youtubers tend to do, but then that’s very expensive and not really something that ordinary people would be willing to invest in.
That’s not to say that the other responses are wrong and that the resonance of the jawbone doesn’t affect how we perceive our own voices (they’re correct, and the resonance does affect our own perception), but simply saying that it’s just the resonance is missing out on the crucial detail that our voice recordings are fundamentally trash to begin with.
As an analogy, you can try taking a selfie using an old laptop’s front-facing camera. You probably won’t like how you look either - you’d look either sickly pale or drunken red, eyebags appear out of nowhere, the distortion of the lens makes you look fat. All of these qualities aren’t because you are any of these things in real life. It’s simply that laptop cameras are bad. Same is true for microphones and speakers.
This seems backwards. Most desktop speakers are shit. If you’re into headphones at all you hopefully will have some that sound better.
That is not correct. Headphones encompasses a variety of methods of putting speakers next to ears. Earphones are one of many types of headphone. Or actually more than one because colloquially some people refer to a few different form factors of headphones that way. IEMs for example are often also referred to as earphones. Language is sloppy like that.
As an analogy, you can try taking a selfie using an old laptop’s front-facing camera. You probably won’t like how you look either - you’d look either sickly pale or drunken red, eyebags appear out of nowhere, the distortion of the lens makes you look fat. All of these qualities aren’t because you are any of these things in real life. It’s simply that laptop cameras are bad. Same is true for microphones and speakers.
I think you make a good point with the hardware aspects of this, and on this last point I can’t help but be a little amused, as while it’s often very true, personally I sometimes prefer the lower res quality of a laptop camera as it can help obfuscate some of the finer details I don’t much care for. It’s basically a hardware lo-fi filter, and I appreciate it not catching every pore. 😂
