Why You Hate The Sound of Your Own Voice (And How To Love It Instead)
In April, I launched a brand new podcast. The episodes are roughly 30 minutes long, and feature me interviewing scientists and other experts, and telling stories about animals and nature. In other words, it features my voice — a lot. And that took some serious getting used to.
Like most people, I suffer from a little bit of “voice confrontation” — the term for hating the way your voice sounds on recordings. Even if you haven’t dipped a toe into podcasting, you probably know the feeling: you hear yourself recorded on a voicemail message, or a TikTok, and think, “is that really what I sound like?”
The potentially-bad news: yes, that is what you sound like. Or, at least, it’s a lot closer to what you really sound like than what you hear inside your head.
When we talk, we hear the sound being conducted over the air, just like the people we’re talking to hear it. But our skulls also act like a kind of surround sound system. Our voices vibrate through the dense bone, which adds resonance and lower frequencies that others aren’t hearing. Thus, the recorded version sounds higher and thinner, and we tend to dislike it.
In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, Dr Silke Paulmann, a psychologist at the University of Essex, said:
