You know your voice. You hear it every day. Yet when you hear a recording of yourself, it sounds oddly higher, thinner, or just… wrong. It can be so unfamiliar that you might wonder whether the microphone has changed it. But that recording is much closer to your real voice, the one everyone else hears every day. Everyone, that is, except you.
Actually, when you speak, sound gets to your inner ear two different ways. Some of it goes through the air, into your ear canal, and hits your eardrum. This is the way everyone else hears you. But your vocal cords also shake your skull, and those vibrations go straight through the bone. This second route is called bone conduction.
"wait, that's real?"
Bone conduction changes the final sound your brain receives. The vibrations traveling through your skull are really good at carrying low-frequency parts of your voice, making the voice you hear inside your head sound deeper and fuller. So you hear a slightly remixed version of your own voice every time you speak.
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Want proof? Cup your hands around your ears, or hold a sheet of paper next to them, and talk. You’ll notice your voice gets thinner, a bit less deep. That’s closer to what everyone else has been hearing all along.
A recording cuts out the bone conduction route. A microphone only picks up sound traveling through the air. So when you hit play, your ears get your voice with no skull vibrations helping out.
That’s why it sounds high and strange. The recording is closer to what other people normally hear. Your brain, however, has spent years getting used to the blended version produced by both air and bone conduction.
So the next time you hear your voice played back and think, “Do I really sound like that?” the answer is yes. Really. The strange part isn’t the recording. It’s that all of us spend our whole lives hearing our own voice differently from everyone else.
Story Sources: BBC, Antares Tech
