Why You Hate the Sound of Your Own Voice

You might remember the first time you heard a recording of your own voice. “That’s me? I sound like that? I’m hideous!”

Just about every human feels this way–including people like me who make a living with their voices. I’m told I have a nice voice by listeners and producers and engineers, but I don’t hear it. Never did.

This tendency to cringe at how we sound is totally natural. A site called Science of Us explains why we react negatively to recordings of our own voices.

You listen to yourself all day long. Why would a recording of your voice make you feel uncomfortable?

The unfamiliarity is quite literally all in your head, although you’re not imagining things. When you hear yourself speak, you’re essentially hearing a distorted version of your own voice; on the other hand, when you hear a recording of your voice — I’m very sorry to say this — you’re hearing yourself the way everyone else hears you.

The distinction here is caused by the physiology of your own skull. You hear yourself in surround sound, in a way, in that the sound waves from your own speech reach your ears through two separate pathways. There is air conduction, which means that when you speak, the sound travels through the air and into your ear canals, causing the eardrums to vibrate. From there, the sound is carried through the little bones of the ear until it arrives at the cochlea, the sensory organ that contains nerves connected to the brain’s auditory regions, where the sound waves are interpreted into something meaningful. This, in fact, is how you perceive not only your own voice, but any sound at all.

Keep reading for the rest of the explanation.