Why do our voices sound different in our heads?
When I was younger, I used to hate the sound of my voice. I’m still not the biggest fan of it, but after watching myself and listening to myself enough, I’ve gotten more used to it. But I’ve never understood why my voice sounds so different in my head than out loud. Why is this?
Answers ( 1 )
In short, your skull acts like the sounding board in a piano.
The sounds produced by your vocal cords vibrate your skin, nasal cavities and your skull, which the inner ear perceives as additional sound waves. The sound of your voice is reflected off objects back towards your ears, causing it to lose energy and drop a bit in pitch. This plus the reverb off your skull adds bass. What you hear in a recording is much closer to what others hear than the deeper version you think you’re hearing.
Oh, it gets worse! You see yourself in reflective surfaces, so the face you’ve been seeing is a flipped mirror image of what you really look like. All faces are asymmetrical, although supermodels display fewer variations. Those variations when reversed give you a distorted impression of what you look like.
So yes, what you look like and sound like in a video is what everyone else experiences. Take comfort in knowing that their experience of themselves is equally distorted.