It’s always a surprise to hear a recording of our own voices. Jordan Gaines, a PhD candidate at Penn State, writes that the aversion to our own voice occurs because of the two different ways sound enters our ears: sounds transmitted through air conduction and bone conduction. When we hear our voices played back to us, the sound is air-conducted, in which the ear is stimulated by external sound waves. However when we speak, our inner ear is stimulated by both the internal vibrations in our bodies and the external sound coming out of our mouths. This combination is what makes our voices sound so differently to us. The bone conduction adds a deeper and fuller quality to our voices, which is not present when listening to ourselves on a recording.
Gaines writes:
Our skulls deceive us by, in fact, lowering the frequency of these vibrations along the way, which is why we often perceive ourselves as higher-pitched when we listen to a recording.
We go through our lives thinking that our bone-conducted voice is how the world truly hears us, but we are actually the only person who can hear that version of ourselves. Now don’t you feel special now?
(via Jordan Gaines)