You know your own voice. You’ve heard it every day of your life.
Then somebody plays a recording of you and apparently an entirely different person has stolen your face.
Your voice sounds thinner. Higher. Maybe slightly nasal. Certainly not like the rich and perfectly normal voice you thought you had been using.
Unfortunately, the recording is not betraying you.
Your skull has been cheating.
Why Your Recorded Voice Sounds Different
When somebody else speaks to you, sound waves travel through the air, enter your ear canal, vibrate your eardrum and eventually reach the cochlea in your inner ear.
When you speak, that still happens.
But you also get a second version of your voice delivered from inside your own head.
Vibrations created by your vocal cords travel through tissues and bones in your head directly towards your inner ear. This is known as bone conduction.
Those vibrations particularly strengthen some of the lower-frequency components of your voice.
So the voice you normally hear while speaking is effectively a mixture of two signals: sound travelling through the air and sound travelling through your own head.
A normal recording only captures the first one.
Take away that extra low-frequency contribution and your familiar voice can suddenly sound noticeably thinner or higher.
The recording isn’t necessarily changing your voice.
It is removing something you are used to hearing.
Everyone Else Has Been Hearing the Recording Version
There is an especially cruel little detail here.
The unfamiliar version is much closer to the voice everyone around you has been hearing all along.
Other people do not have your skull conveniently conducting your voice into their inner ears. They mostly hear the sound travelling through the air.
That doesn’t mean a phone recording is a flawless representation of how you sound to other people.
Microphones, speakers, compression, room acoustics and recording software can all alter sound.
A tiny phone microphone certainly isn’t the same thing as a human ear standing a metre away.
But the fundamental reason your recorded voice feels different is that one of your normal listening pathways has disappeared.
Why Does It Sound So Wrong?
There is another problem: familiarity.
You have spent thousands upon thousands of hours hearing your voice with bone conduction included.
That is your internal reference for what “me” sounds like.
A recording suddenly presents a different version of an extremely familiar sound.
Humans are very good at noticing discrepancies in familiar things. A tiny difference in a stranger’s voice might mean nothing to you. The same difference in your own can feel enormous.
There can also be a psychological element.
When you speak normally, you are concentrating on what you are saying. When you listen to yourself afterwards, you can suddenly analyse every pause, breath, accent, hesitation and strange noise you had no idea you made.
Congratulations: you have become your own worst audio critic.
Can You Hear Your Voice the Way Other People Do?
Roughly, yes.
Recording yourself with a reasonable microphone from a natural speaking distance gives you a much better approximation of the voice other people hear than listening to yourself while you talk.
But even that will vary depending on the room, microphone and playback equipment.
Another surprisingly simple demonstration works in the opposite direction.
If you block your ears and speak, air-conducted external sound is reduced while internally conducted vibration becomes more noticeable. Your voice can suddenly seem much deeper and boomier.
You are exaggerating the same effect that normally makes your live voice sound fuller to you than a recording does.
Do Singers and Broadcasters Get Used to It?
Very often, yes.
People who frequently record themselves tend to become much more familiar with their externally heard voice.
That strange disconnect gradually loses its novelty.
The voice hasn’t changed. Their mental picture of it has.
It is one reason somebody who spends hours editing podcasts or videos may barely react to hearing themselves while someone listening to their first voicemail recording wants to throw the phone into the sea.
The Bottom Line
Your recorded voice sounds strange because you normally hear yourself through two routes at once.
Sound reaches your ears through the air, just as it does for everyone else, but vibrations also travel through your head and add extra lower-frequency sound.
A recording removes that bone-conducted part.
So the unfamiliar voice coming from the speaker isn’t some horrible electronic distortion of the real you.
Annoyingly, it is probably closer to what everyone else thought you sounded like in the first place.
FAQ
Why does my voice sound higher in recordings?
Bone conduction tends to strengthen lower-frequency parts of your voice when you hear yourself speaking. Recordings largely remove that effect, which can make your voice seem higher or thinner.
Is my recorded voice my real voice?
It is closer to the sound other people hear, but microphones, rooms, speakers and audio processing can all affect a recording.
Why do I hate hearing my own recorded voice?
Part of the reaction is likely unfamiliarity. You are extremely accustomed to hearing your voice with internal bone conduction, so the externally recorded version can sound surprisingly wrong.
Does everyone hear their own voice differently?
Yes. Anyone producing speech hears a combination of air-conducted and internally conducted sound that listeners around them do not receive in the same way.
Further Reading
Why Do You Get Goosebumps? Your Body Is Running Ancient Software
Why Do You Forget Why You Walked Into a Room? The Doorway Might Actually Be Part of It
Why Do We Yawn — and Why Is It So Contagious? Science Still Has One Awkward Problem
Sources
Why does my voice sound so different when it is recorded and played back? :: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-does-my-voice-sound-different/