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(The Conversation) -
As a surgeon who specializes in treating patients with voice problems, I routinely record my patients speaking.
For me, these recordings are incredibly valuable.
They allow me to track slight changes in their voices from visit to visit, and help me confirm whether surgery or voice therapy led to improvements.
However, I am amazed at how difficult these sessions can be for my patients.
Many feel visibly uncomfortable hearing their voice played.
"Do I really sound like that?" They wonder, grimacing.
(Yes, that's how you sound.)
Some are so upset that they flatly refuse to listen to the recording, much less to go over the subtle changes I want to highlight.
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The discomfort we feel when hearing our voices in audio recordings is probably due to a mixture of physiology and psychology.
For one thing, the sound from an audio recording is transmitted differently to your brain than the sound generated when you speak.
When you listen to a recording of your voice, the sound travels through the air and reaches your ears, known as "air conduction".
Sound energy vibrates the eardrum and the small bones of the ear.
These bones then transmit sound vibrations to the cochlea, which stimulates nerve axons that send the auditory signal to the brain.
However, when you speak, the sound of your voice reaches the inner ear in a different way.
While some of the sound is transmitted through air conduction, much of the sound is conducted internally directly through the bones of the skull.
When you hear your own voice when you speak, it is due to a combination of external and internal conduction, and internal bone conduction seems to increase the lower frequencies.
For this reason, people generally perceive their voice as deeper and richer when they speak.
The recorded voice, by comparison, can sound thinner and higher in pitch, which many find to be disgraceful.
There is a second reason why listening to a recording of your voice can be so disconcerting.
It really is a new voice, one that exposes a difference between your self-perception and reality.
Because your voice is unique and an important component of self identity, this discrepancy can be jarring.
Suddenly, you realize that other people have been listening to something different the whole time.
While we may actually sound more like our recorded voice to others, I think the reason many of us squirm when listening to it is not that the recorded voice is necessarily worse than our perceived voice.
Instead, we are simply more used to hearing ourselves sound a certain way.
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A 2005 study had patients with voice problems rate their own voices when they were presented with recordings of them.
They also had the doctors rate the voices.
The researchers found that patients, in general, tended to rate the quality of their recorded voice more negatively compared to objective evaluations by physicians.
So if the voice in your head criticizes the voice coming out of a recording device, it is probably your inner critic who is overreacting, and you are judging yourself too harshly.
Neel Bhatt is an assistant professor of otolaryngology at the University of Washington.
Published under a Creative Commons license from The Conversation.
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