Solve the doubt about why people hate to listen to their own voice

Have you ever recorded your voice then listened to the recorded voice? The voice that we hear everyday sounds weird and unfamiliar till we hardly believe that voice is our own and lead to the stage where we hate our voice. What is the reason for this? ACU PAY will take you to find the answer together! Voice is something that we have heard everyday and familiar with, so it is not surprising that many people do not like their voice in the video clip or in the record because the voice that everybody else hears is very high-pitched and very funny. Some people define the situation in which we hate our voice as Voice Confrontation.

Why do we hear our voice differently from everybody else?

Normally, we hear other people’s voices via the intermediary called air then goes into our ear which trembles our eardrum, and our brain will change those vibrations into voices.

However, when we are the ones speaking, our ears receive voices 2 ways. The first one is from outside, just like we hear when others speak, and the other one is from the voice heard inside our skull which is caused by the tremble of vocal cords.

The vibration of vocal cords will go through our skull bones and then go to the eardrum which is called Bone Conduction. The voice from bone conduction is a low frequency voice which makes the sound that we hear when we speak softer and lower-pitched than reality.

Thus, when we hear our recorded voices, we will hear the version of voices that go through air, the low-pitched voice from bone conduction is gone, and that is the reason why the voice we hear is high-pitched.

Why do we hate our own voices?

Professor Dr. Silke Paulmann, head of the Department of Psychology at Essex University, said in an interview with The Guardian magazine that the reason we don’t like our own high-pitched voice is because the voice we hear does not meet our inner expectations. Our voice plays an important role in shaping our unique characters and no one would love their own voices if their voices are not like their expectations.

In addition, there is research which makes the participants listen to their own voice. Only 38% of participants can remember their own voices immediately while the rest have to take a while or some cannot recognise their voices at all. This research shows that we often remember our voice heard in our head through our imagination rather than the real voices that other people hear.

In conclusion, all of us will hear our voices through the combination of two ways which are from the outside (air) and the inside (bone construction). This is the reason why our voices in the recorder or TikTok clips are different from the way we usually hear our voices because the voice we hear is different from the voice we are familiar with.