Have you ever recorded yourself talking and then made the mistake of playing it back?
Well, the horror you face as you hear the worst sounding voice on the planet is something that isn’t just happening to you.
It’s all of us.
There’s almost nothing as embarrassing than realising what other people have to listen to when you talk to them.
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Thanks to TikTok, we’re all realising that we feel the exact same way when it comes to the way our voices sound, and there’s a little bit of camaraderie here.
Plenty of people online believe their voices are more high-pitched than initially thought and according to Ashish Shah, an audiologist at The Hearing Care Partnership, there’s an actual reason for the phenomenon.
Speaking to The Mirror Shah explained: "When we speak, the sound of our voice is transferred to our ears in two ways, externally by air conduction, and internally through our bones.
"The bone conduction transfers lower frequencies that air-conducted sound does not, and is what gives our voices the lower tone we are used to.
“When we speak to someone else, they are only hearing our voice through air-conducted sound, so they will be hearing us in a higher frequency, and so the same goes for when we listen back to our own voices via a recording.
“When we hear our voices through a recording, we do not have the bone-conducted sound to add the lower frequencies, so we hear ourselves in a way that we are not used to hearing. And this is why we often find people saying they dislike the sound of their voice when they hear it played back to them.”
Apparently, when people hear their own voice and know it’s theirs, they’ll instinctively wince.
However, if you remove the identity of the person and let them listen to the voice as though it was a random voice clip, they have no problem.
Shah explained: "Interestingly, a previous study found that when a group of participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of several different voice recordings, that secretly included their own, they rated their voice much higher when they did not realise it was theirs.
"Generally, we don’t analyse the voices of others, so you can almost guarantee that people are not analysing yours.
"The judgement we pass on the sound of our voice is wholly based on it not being what we know or expect of ourselves and therefore it makes us uncomfortable, but the reality is, this is the only way others know us.”
That’s pretty weird.
Britt Jones