Why Don’t We Like The Recorded Sound Of Our Voice?
It happens many times. Someone records us and, when we hear our own voice an unpleasant sensation invades us, a mixture of shame and annoyance when we notice that, curiously, what sounds is nothing like the way we speak.
Furthermore, this is becoming more and more common. As the use of voice messages and social networks becomes popular, little by little it is becoming very normal to have to face that horrible noise that is our recorded voice. An unclear, sometimes shaky and curiously dull tone of voice that does not do us justice. Thinking that this is what others hear when we vibrate our vocal cords is quite discouraging.
But why does this happen? Where is it born from that mixture of own and other people’s shame What do we usually notice when we listen to our recorded voice? The cause is psychological.
The first thing to keep in mind to understand this phenomenon is that, although we do not realize it, the human brain is constantly learning what our voice is like. It is quite easy, since most people use our vocal cords a lot throughout a day, so our nervous system monitors what that sound is like, creates a kind of imaginary “average” of how our voice sounds and the it fixes our self-concept in real time
And what is self-concept? It is precisely what the word indicates: the concept of oneself. Is about an abstract idea of one’s own identity, and therefore overlaps with many other concepts. For example, if we believe that we are self-confident, this idea will be closely linked to our self-concept, and possibly the same will happen, for example, with an animal with which we identify: the wolf, for example. If our identity is closely linked to the country in which we were born, all the ideas linked to this concept will also be part of our self-concept: its gastronomy, its landscapes, its traditional music, etc.
In short, the self-concept is made up of ideas and stimuli that reach us through all the senses: images, tactile sensations, sounds…
Comparing the recording with what we heard
Thus, our voice will be one of the most important stimuli of our self-concept. If tomorrow we woke up with a completely different voice, we would notice right away and possibly suffer an identity crisis, even if that new tone of voice was completely functional. Since we are listening to our vocal cords all the time, this sound takes deep roots in our identity and, in turn, We learn to make it fit with all the sensations and concepts that make up the self-concept.
Now… is it really our voice that we internalize as if it were part of us? Yes and no. In part yes, because the sound starts from the vibration of our vocal cords and is what we use to speak and express our points of view and our own vision of the world. But, at the same time, no, because the sound that our brain registers is not just our voice but a mixture of this and many other things.
What we are doing when we listen to each other in a normal context is actually hearing the sound of our vocal cords muffled and amplified by our own body: cavities, muscles, bones, etc. We perceive it in a different way than we do with any other sound, because it comes from within us.
And what happens with the recordings?
On the other hand, when our voice is recorded, we listen to it just as we would listen to the voice of any other person: we record the waves that our eardrums collect, and from there to the auditory nerve. There are no shortcuts, and our body does not amplify that sound any more than it would any other noise.
What actually happens is that these types of recordings are a blow to our self-concept, since we see one of the central ideas on which our identity is built questioned: that our voice is X, and not Y.
At the same time, questioning this pillar of one’s own identity causes others to falter This new sound is recognized as something strange, that does not fit into what we are supposed to be and that, in addition, creates a mess in that network of interconnected concepts that is the self-concept. What happens if we sound a little weaker than expected? How does that fit with that image of a robust and compact man that floats in our imagination?
The bad news is that the voice that makes us so ashamed of others is precisely the same one that everyone else hears every time we talk The good news is that much of the unpleasant sensation we experience when hearing it is due to the comparative clash between the voice we usually hear and that other one, and not because our voice is particularly annoying.
