Why don't we like to hear our real voice?

According to The Guardian, most of us shudder when we hear our own voice. In fact, it is very common to dislike your own voice and it has its own phrase: voice confrontation.

But why does this happen often when we hear our voice while it hardly happens when listening to someone else's voice?

The common explanation of the media is that when listening to your own voice in the conversation, we get both sounds transmitted to the ear through air propagation and bone transmission. Bone conduction provides sound with very low frequencies. So when recording, the voice will not have such a low frequency, making our voices become higher and different. Basically, because the voice after recording is not the same as imagining, we don't feel like our own voice.

Dr Silke Paulmann, a psychologist at Essex University, said: "I speculate that when I hear my voice is higher than I imagined, it makes me shudder. Because the voice plays an important role in form the identity of each person and I guess no one likes to realize that they are not really themselves ".

Picture 1 of Why don't we like to hear our real voice?
When recording, the voice will not have such a low frequency, making our voices become higher and different.

Indeed, realizing that my voice sounded more like Mickey Mouse made me disappointed. However, some studies have shown that this is only an explanation.

For example, a 2013 study asked participants to assess the attractiveness of different recording voice patterns. When their own voices were also mixed with these voices, the participants ranked their voices significantly higher without realizing it was their voice.

Furthermore, comprehensive answers can be found in a series of studies published many years ago before there were reports of sound frequencies with prospective explanations.

Through experiments, in 1966, two psychologists Phil Holzemann and Clyde Rousey concluded that voice confrontation arises not only from frequency differences, but also from notable discoveries that occur when feel the sound transmission . Specifically, the voice is not only different from the expectation, but through what is called the "sub-linguistic signal" , it shows personality aspects that we can only fully recognize when listening to it from a copy. sound recording. They include aspects such as our level of anxiety, hesitation, sadness, anger, . of us.

According to the quote, "The interruption is a reaction to the sudden encounter in the voice expression that the subject does not intend to express and until that point, they are not aware of what they have expressed. ".

The complexity of the chord is huge and we simply don't have complete "online" control. Indeed, the larynx contains the highest proportion of muscle fibers in the human body. Moreover, when listening to a recording, we can't control our voice as often as we do, creating a sense of chaos.

Marc Pell is a neurologist at McGill University, specializing in emotional communication. He supported the studies of Holzemann and Rousey and said: "When hearing your own voice, you can automatically assess your voice the way we often do with other people's voices . I think that we use our impressions of other people's voices to assess society, which makes many people uncomfortable or dissatisfied with the way they say it because the impressions that are formed are not consistent with the social characteristics. Assembly they want ".

So it is likely that others are also surprised by the pitch of your voice but they may not be similarly evaluated about your voice as you do yourself. We tend not to criticize the voices of others, so it is possible that you are the only one who thinks his voice is the same as "Mickey Mouse".