Why do people hate hearing recordings of their own voice? (And, listen to a recording of mine)
And do they really hate them, actually?
Apparently a great many people do, and here are some theories as to why. The most common one given is that it’s a surprise; we hear our own voices differently than they sound to others.
But the article gives some other theories that have come up as a result of research:
Through their experiments, the late psychologists Phil Holzemann and Clyde Rousey concluded in 1966 that voice confrontation arises not only from a difference in expected frequency, but also a striking revelation that occurs upon the realisation of all that your voice conveys. Not only does it sound different than you expect; through what are called “extra-linguistic cues”, it reveals aspects of your personality that you can only fully perceive upon hearing it from a recording. These include aspects such as your anxiety level, indecision, sadness, anger, and so on.
Interesting. I’ve always felt that people’s voices reveal a tremendous amount about them. I’m extraordinarily sensitive to voice tones on the phone, for example (I don’t know whether most people share that trait or not, however). I usually can tell from the first “hello” whether persons are going to give me trouble or not, whether I will like them, whether they are lying down, whether they are in a hurry or otherwise reluctant to talk, and much more. When I’ve had a chance to learn whether I’m right or wrong, I’ve almost always learned I was right.
As for my own voice on recordings, I’ve heard it so often over the years that I don’t have much of a reaction to it at all. The first time I heard it, though, I was indeed surprised. I was a child, and I just didn’t recognize that voice as me although I knew it was. When I was a teenager I owned a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I thought my voice sounded lazier and less incisive than I’d expected it to be.
Many of you old-timers on this blog are quite familiar with my voice from the old PJ Sanity Squad podcasts, which are no longer available online. However, after our PJ gig ended, we went over to Blog Talk Radio, and that site seems to have preserved at least some of our podcasts there. I did a search and clicked on this one from May of 2008. Ten years ago.
I do the intro that night, so you can hear quite a bit of my voice right at the beginning (after the scream; the shrieking was not me, it was our theme). I probably sound similar today. The clarity of the recording isn’t great, so there’s a bit of extra muddiness and murkiness. But that’s essentially what I sound like, although my actual voice is somewhat more clear.
I went there just to listen to my voice rather than the content. But I found myself fascinated by the podcast itself. We are talking about the fight among the Democrats between Hillary and Obama during the primaries, which were ongoing. The discussion turns out to be exceedingly relevant to today because we are actually talking about the Democrats’ attempts to appeal to what later became known as the rust-belt Trump voter. Towards the end of the podcast we also talk about similar movements in Europe.
Some of the predictions aren’t correct, of course. But I was surprised by how very much of it holds up. If you have some time, give a listen. I don’t talk much except for the intro and a couple of later statements—I’m the moderator—but the entire thing is very very interesting.
[ADDENDUM: If you want to hear an 11-minute interview with me (circa 2013), you can go here.]
All that time in New England and your voice has lost its New Yawk distinctiveness.
My voice sounds repulsive on phone messages but passable on videotape. That makes no sense.
Yes, when I first heard your voice on another recording I was surprised at how relatively languid, and even throaty it seemed. Almost a drawl.
Not exactly “Come up and see me sometime” in pitch and timbre, but verging on it.
You have no trace of identifiable regionalism or ethnicity in what I have heard so far.
Oddly enough, I knew another counselor (MSW/ and psychotherapist) who had a very similar voice to yours. As did my senior year high school English teacher; a department head who was someone who tended to consider her words before she spoke, and who thus spoke deliberately.
I suppose many of us are surprised by the sound of our own voices, and mine is not as clipped as I thought it would be, either.
Someone said over the phone to me, “Hey, you know who you sound like?” And being stupid enough to ask “who?”, and figuring I had to sound somewhat like my Dad’s baritone, and imagining that they would at least refer to an old timey actor like Charlton Heston, or that guy who played “Shane”, I instead heard, “Gene Hackman”.
What? What!!!?” WHAT???!!!!!”
Gene Hackman … with a stuffed up nose … Geez.
Glad to know I’m not the only one who hates the sound of their voice on a recording. During my days flying for the airlines I made many, many cockpit to cabin announcements. And received quite a few compliments on my voice. I guess there is no accounting for what some find pleasing. After getting compliments on my announcements, I hoped that my voice sounded something on the order of a Richard Burton or Richard Basehart. But no. What I hear in a recording is an unattractive nasally drawl, much slower than anyone should be made to listen to. I keep thinking, “Spit it out. No one wants to wait forever to hear what you’ve got to say.” Glad I don’t have to listen to me. My wife of 62 years has had to put up with it all these years. What an angel she is.
I’m surprised by your accent, expected more northern New England. Unlike Art Deco, I hear plenty of New York in your speaking, perhaps because I’ve lived my entire life in the Boston area. The NY in your voice is not pronounced, it is subtle. Linguists would probably guess at your upbringing in NY and later move to New England. I never would have guessed at your tone and tenor, wouldn’t even have attempted to do so based on a writing style.
I’ve often heard my voice on tape – since I was a broadcaster, DJ, radio announcer, narrator and media expert for a good few years. I sound … well, pretty much as I expect to sound, although perhaps a bit more polished then I would have expected. I’ve always had a rather pleasant voice – as I have been constantly told since I was a teenager, and rigorous voice training through DINFOS sanded off whatever rough edges there were. I’m told I sound faintly English or mid-Atlantic – slightly clipped, and erudite. Which I used to advantage, you bet!
The old broadcaster trick, of cupping your hand over your ear as you speak, would give someone a good notion of what they sound like to others.
To all who commented on and are curious about my accent—
I purposely got rid of my NY accent long, long ago. I told the story here.
The sound of your voice didn’t surprise me. But the speed at which you speak did.
I expected something faster, more clipped.
I purposely got rid of my NY accent long, long ago. I told the story here.
My Okie mother and her cousin, as a consequence of WW2, married northerners and moved to New England- though her cousin spent only about 20 years in the North. Her cousin remained with a trace of her Okie accent all her life. My mother lost her Okie accent. One time I asked my mother about this. The reply was not what I expected: “I got tired of total strangers coming up to me, putting their arms around my shoulder, and asking, ‘What part of Texas are you from, honey?’ ” 🙂
I haven’t tried to lose traces of my New England origin during my decades in Texas, though I haven’t tried to eliminate Southwestern phrasing such as “y’all” or “INsurance” from my speech, either. As I had been hearing them all my life from my Okie and TX relatives, adding such to my speech came naturally. Perhaps because from childhood I have felt a dual attachment to both the Southwest and to New England, I felt no need to expel the New England part of me when I moved to Texas.
BTW, John Kerry is a good example of all hat and no cattle.
The importance of voice and its associated non-verbal messages is a reason that I am flat opposed to the texting craze that has taken millenials by storm.
About 70% of the data is in body language, 20% in voice tone and frequency, and merely 10% is in the actual words used.
Interrogators use voice quality to assess subjects all the time and so do psychologists and politicians.
I purposely got rid of my NY accent long, long ago. I told the story here.
I could understand Mary Tyler Moore doing that for business reasons. She was a an aspiring perfomer (her voice at 25 was significantly different from what it had been at age 18, as well). Still, of all that I didn’t care for about Louise Slaughter, one thing I kind of liked was that at age 85 she still sounded like Kentucky, even though she hadn’t lived there since she was about 25.
I don’t think Philip Seymour Hoffman’s theatre training managed to flush out the Inland North in his voice, though it didn’t hit you over the head. Miss the guy. There was something so very familiar about him.
It is a real treat to hear your voice, and it is a pleasure to listen to someone whose sentences are not filled with throat-clearing verbal tics.
“whether they are lying down, ”
Yeah, right. Maybe over a Skype video call. Otherwise, that’s just BS.
neo,
I was listening to the 2008 conversation, and my reaction therein, to the music of your voice as opposed to the substance of what you (or any of your friends) said, was this: you sounded much more like I thought you’d sound than I really expected.
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It’s caused by a dissonance forced by a discrepancy between our internal perception and recorded playback. The same reason for our love-hate relationship with mirrors, lighting, etc.
Those of us who used cassette recorders for dictation in the 1980-2000 era became very used to hearing our own voices, playbacks being essential to pick up where we left off, listening to see if we’d failed to include all required data, etc..
This still occurs; only the devices have changed.
I found nothing ‘wrong’ with my voice, other than that my regional accent was more pronounced than I heard it in my head.
I think I still feel awkward hearing my own voice because it becomes apparent to me how much of an unidentifiable pastiche it is. Not so much my voice, then, which is just a bit more nasal than I’d expect it to be, but how I enunciate.
In some cases, I have distinct traces of my Bay Area California upbringing; in others, I sound Southern, but more of the not-quite-Southern Southern of some Floridians. There are many words I won’t pronounce the same way in two consecutive sentences (on a recent recording from a lecture, I said “saying” with a “g” like the Californian in me, then in the very next sentence said, “What’m’sayin,'” like a Southerner).
And then there’s the occasional Boston inroad as well, because my dad’s whole family has thick Boston accents (I never lived there). I pronounce words with the short “o” sound – words like “boss” – after that fashion: “bawss.”
I get quite self-conscious about it and try to fix it, but then it makes me rather halting when I speak, because my brain is turned on itself, monitoring what it’s doing as it’s doing it.
At any rate, I wonder if this kind of “pastiche” accent or mode of speech is more common these days due to people floating around from one place to another and being less rooted in general.
Or maybe I’m just weird. Who knows. When I come back to the States in a few years I’ll probably be speaking Chinglish.
P.S. – sorry for the double post, but after re-listening to the 2013 interview it finally struck me who neo sounds like, almost exactly:
Diana Trilling.
If you’ve never heard her speak, she’s briefly in a documentary on the New York intellectuals (Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, et al.), but I’m not sure there are other recordings of her readily available.
…Yeah, I found a Firing Line episode with her
here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUd49JVoT8&t=268s&frags=pl%2Cwn
She’s a bit older there than she was when I saw her speak, but the basic considered pattern and enunciation are how I remember them.
kolnai:
Well, at least I don’t sound exactly like Buckley 🙂 ! He had such a recognizable, characteristic style of speaking.
Listening to Trilling was certainly interesting. I don’t hear her as sounding much like me (or rather, I don’t think I sound much like her), but somewhat. The biggest similarity I hear is the cadence, pace, and tone, rather than the accent. She speaks in a very measured way, and so do I ordinarily.
The person I really sound a lot like is my sister-in-law. My mother used to not be able to recognize on the phone which one of us was calling (that was before caller ID). Nor were our friends able to tell us apart, if we happened to be visiting each other and one of us happened to answer the phone for the other.
I also once heard some actress who sounded exactly like me (or I like her), but I no longer remember who that was.
neo – God, I wish I spoke like Buckley. I could say the most moronic things (as I’m sure I still do) and would nonetheless sound brilliant. As it stands, I fear my voice and manner of speaking have rather the opposite effect: even when I say intelligent things people still think I’m a moron.
Or maybe not a moron, but… it’s hard to explain. I look and sound *much* younger than I am. I don’t have a high-pitched voice, yet it’s no baritone either. I still get carded in bars, and when I show my ID it’s obvious that they think it’s fake (because there’s no way I could be as old as my ID says I am). It’s difficult to command immediate respect in a classroom, as I look like I’m 25. And, unfortunately, I gather that I sound that way too.
It’s not comfortable to admit this, but I have noticed that men of past generations usually *sound* like men, educated like Buckley or not. Even in movies it’s obvious: the actors my age still look and sound like what we call “young men.” I find myself wondering, per DNWs remarks: who in the world could be Gene Hackman today? Who will grow up to sound like Denzel Washington? Who could be Robert Duvall? Etc.
I’m vaguely aware of research indicating much lower testosterone levels in current gen males – and when I compare just the general stereotypical masculinity of my dad and my grandfather to myself, it *sounds* all too plausible, prima facie.
Be that as it may, you’re right about you and Trilling. And it’s more apparent in the 2013 Savage interview than in the earlier recording. It’s definitely more the *way* you speak than the accent.
But it’s a compliment, regardless. I always found D. Trilling a hypnotic speaker. I tend to like the “measured way” more than the rapid fire approach. It just strikes me as weightier and less blustery.
(Curious Last Thought: most of the “manly men” in film today are Aussies, like Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, etc. Not sure what to make of that.)
kolnai:
Thanks; I took it as a compliment, because I like the way Trilling speaks.
As for looking young—I’m going to say the conventional thing, which is some day you’ll be happy about it, because it probably will continue to be the case. When you’re 50 you’ll be happy to look 35 (probably).
I do think that old-time actors had more “manly” characteristics for the most part. I think part of the reason is that they had more rough-and-tumble lifetime experiences prior to acting (generally–I am sure there were exceptions). If your voice really troubles you, have you ever considered speech lessons? I bet your voice isn’t half as bad as you think it is, though.
I did think of the person I remembered sounding like when I heard her. She wasn’t an actress after all. It was this person, who happens to be one of my favorite fiction authors. When I first heard her speak it was an audio without the visuals, and I was amazed at how much her voice resembles mine (cadence, pace, tone, accent, timbre). Maybe not exactly (couldn’t be exactly), but really close.
neo – well, I may have given the impression that it bothers me more than it does, and indeed it isn’t my voice that bothers me so much as my speech patterns being all over the place.
It isn’t merely the hodgepodge of accents. Sometimes I speak in the rapid fire Jordan Peterson-way, sometimes in the deliberate measured way, etc. I’ve had separate people who know me relatively well call me a man of few words (in speech, of course – never in writing!) and a motor mouth.
Again, this is hard to explain, but I’ll try. The lack of comfort with it goes to the core of myself, in the sense that it’s not that my speech sounds bad or even all that eccentric – in truth, I’m a good enough public speaker and lecturer – but that my shifting registers somehow indicate that I’m always putting on a show, more or less subconsciously. To put it in a Yogi Berra type of way: I don’t intend it to be intentional.
So I start to wonder: what *is* my real voice, my real way of speaking, the way that is all-the-way me? Is there even such a “way,” and if not, is there such a “me”? It irks me with suspicions about my own fraudulence, or at the very least my inauthenticity (loaded existentialist word, but you take my meaning).
That’s a deep rabbit hole indeed. How did I get that way? Have I always been putting on masks, and for so long that I no longer have a face, let alone one that I would recognize? Etc., etc.
And the weirdest, rabbit-holiest thought of all: I suspect I went plastic in my speech habits in large part because I feared the effect that my natural, naive, unaffected mode of speech would have on people – a kind of pre-emptive shame, maybe about what it would reveal about me – and yet, for this very reason, I never actually had or exercised a natural mode of speaking. Kind of like crushing a seed before it flowers.
Isn’t that a neat little personification of the so-called postmodern condition? Being a simulacrum oneself, the fake being the real.
It’s a fairly haunting feeling when you feel your mere speech patterns to be constant attempts to evade the secret bursting out that there is no there there – there, right where *I* should be.
At any rate, this isn’t a constant theme of my conscious life, but more like a lingering self-doubt that hangs around like a shadow on the periphery of it all.
And I believe it would be *very interesting* for theorists and scientists of speech habits to speculate and hypothesize about patterns like my own and the connection, precisely, to crises of meaning, fears of being No One, and the like. Maybe it’s a dead end and I’m just generalizing unjustifiably from my own idiosyncrasies; but maybe not.
I made a special weekend trip back to this thread in order to see if there were additional comments, and I see that there are, and that they are interesting. JJ left a funny remark that resonates with me.
Kolnai, said this remarkably perceptive thing that stands out among the many perceptive things he said in this thread: “It’s a fairly haunting feeling when you feel your mere speech patterns to be constant attempts to evade the secret bursting out that there is no there there – there, right where *I* should be. ”
And as for you Neo, you sound nothing like the woman in the interview, and much more like an educated Mae West than you are likely to find comfortable. Ha.
As for the pitch of modern men’s voices, I think it is in significant part the result of things, which are not specifically the effects testosterone level and vocal cord thickness, or even sinus resonance.
The first is chronic emotional stress. Everyone has noticed their voices on waking are more profoundly bass than hours later. As a matter of fact, taking 5 deep breaths and telling yourself all is well-in-hand will probably drop your voice an octave.
I also noticed that the older I’ve gotten, the more my voice surprises me … when, say, I am talking to younger people who are seeking information on some topic they know nothing about, and about which I do know a great deal. In those situations I find myself making simple, declarative, unqualified statements as if they are deliverances stamped with the label “To a moral certainty”.
The same goes for discussions with relatives or neighbors, and I am not sure how it happened. I guess that being in business long enough has led me to actually talk like the man behind the desk; i.e, the guy who rises when he decides the conversation is over, and says, “Thank you for coming in”.
I didn’t intend it to happen it just developed the same way my signature did from signing untold thousands of checks …
The second is probably closely related to that issue of stress, in that it is I think the result of social reinforcement. Many men seem to develop that quizzical way of phrasing statements as a means of trying not to be overbearing.
As declarative statements are seen by some as offensive, and nested parenthetical qualifications are verbally unwieldy, they seem to intentionally speak tentatively as though they are seeking social permission or at least validation for every observation.
These possible causes noted, I will also observe that old recordings of speech, and old news reels, give little evidence that the majority of men randomly selected for recording, had deep, confident, and resonant voices. Cops and bystanders talking before news cameras about gangsters in the early 30’s, didn’t sound like the actor Robert Taylor did in the 1950s.
What I considered “normal” as a 60’s child, was then an impression gained from listening to my father or his brother, or other uncles and neighborhood men talk, or from watching old movies on TV. For the locals, it was probably, a factor of their psychology, as well as their genetics.
Having been in and through the war, and then currently engaging in the project of raising families, was an experience that left them with little doubt about who they were, and what they wanted, and how slight was their ongoing moral obligation to put up with, or cater to, the bullshit and neuroses of others, and to endlessly “feel their pain” as the price of merely being alive.
They scratched “putting up with chickenshit” and “feeling guilty for living”, right off the list for starters.
I’m sure their voices reflected that, on top of whatever other factors were in play.
DNW – There’s few refined pleasures like seeing you disagree with something I suggested, since it means I get to read a more thoughtful consideration of the matter that is probably more what I wanted to say anyway.
And of course I think you’re on the right track. It’s not a disparity – if there is a disparity – between baritones and altos; it’s a deeper mixture of confidence breathed into words as their life, tone, and a “no nonsense” mood.
Even my grandfather, a lifelong damn-near religious Democrat who can barely fathom that Republicans exist, is positively one of the most rugged, do-it-yourself, personally sane and sensible men I know. I still hear his favorite exclamations calling me away from stupidity, like Socrates’ daemon: “Boy, what exactly are you trying to accomplish?” (said with a thick Texas accent); “Ah, nonsense, boy.”
The absence of that quizzical mode – like the increasingly prevalent trend of “upspeak” – is practically an essential definition of what we yutes call “old speak,” ie, the way men in particular spoke in 40’s and 50’s newsreels, films, and TV shows.
“I was goin’ here see, doin this see, then over there a man came around see…”. – it’s pretty much the opposite of upspeak.
I hate upspeak so much that it is the only thing I actively suppress when it pops up in my speech. If I catch myself doing it, it’s the hair shirt for a week.
There are the physics and anatomy of speech, the biology of speech (testosterone v. estrogen), the emotions affecting pitch, and the cultural–phrasing and accents, learned by kids by conscious and unconscious imitation.
Consider for example the vocal cords, tiny little muscular strands which, when tight, appose themselves. Hoarseness occurs when they are swollen (laryngitis) or floppy (if paralysed). The larynx is quite a marvelous little muscular box. Like piano wires, the thicker male cords yield lower pitch, the thin female one yield higher pitch. The cords vibrate by the act of exhaling air through the tight appositional gap while speaking; no piano hammer needed! The tension on the cords, and the gap between, are minutely controlled. Thus the marvel of the human voice in song.
There are very very few male sopranos! And a female basso is similarly rare. That’s what i mean by physics and anatomy.
One might wish to discuss all of this with a speech pathologist for great erudition.
Speech pitch has little to do with the social environment. Chronic stress is highly overrated as a cause of many things, including speech variability, despite DNW’s assertion.
Speech patterns, however, do relate to sex and society. The pitch uplift at the end of a sentence makes it sound more like a question than a statement. Swedes are notable for this. Watch ‘Fargo’, the Coen brothers’ movie, for an excellent example in a North Dakota lady cop.
I was the ‘voice’ of a company’s phone system. I worked there as a receptionist, someone like my voice, and I ended up recording all of the phone instructions.
When the calls would overflow to me, I’d answer the phones in the same way. I must have been very consistent because people would take a few seconds to realize that I was a real person, not the recording.
So I was used to hearing my voice when I called in to the company as well.
I’m VERY sensitive to voices and will judge people by their voices, so I don’t like talking on the phone to people before I meet them.
Cicero – very interesting stuff about which I’m entirely ignorant, apparently.
Based on what you say about speech patterns vis-a-vis society, I’m immediately led to reflect on how so many people in my current country of residence don’t engage in gentle Scandinavian-style upspeak, but tend to just always sound somewhat aggressively incredulous. At least in my areas of China, the pattern is like: “eh? What? What you want? That! Yeah? Yeah? Thank you!” (No it’s not just them not liking me; they speak that way to each other).
There’s basically two modes of speech in China: cocksure assertions of sage advice from the tradition (you should do this; “as we say,…”; etc.) and the aforementioned aggressive incredulity.
Just spitballing here, but that tracks with my apprehension of the current Sino-cultural temper. Sacred comfort in the certainties of the magical Chinese tradition (literary and bureaucratic), and a more or less hostile uncertainty or indifference in every other area where bromides can’t be applied.
Fair enough.
“Chronic stress” was probably a poor choice of words since, as a general concept, it is usually taken as applying to a specific individual under pressure, and it doesn’t necessarily convey the sense of generalized social tension, anxiety, and insecurity – leading to the kind of chronic woe-is-me whine – that I had in mind.
And obviously, someone with a naturally and profoundly deep voice will not sound like someone with a pleading nasal whine just because his financial situation deteriorates..
But I think that the psychology of the speaker and the level of tension or anxious insecurity they feel, or are encouraged to feel, do contribute to some of the peculiar de-masculinization of speech patterns noticed in so many in males today.
Hollywood employed voice coaches for years; and not just for elocution and accent correction, if the many available articles about it are any indication.
Of course maybe it’s down to insecticides and all the birth control pill hormones in the water … LOL
“It’s a fairly haunting feeling when you feel your mere speech patterns to be constant attempts to evade the secret bursting out that there is no there there – there, right where *I* should be. ”
Straight outta Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos, which you should read if you haven’t.
Much of what you hear from your own self talking is transmitted to your ears through your own tissues which lowers the pitch you hear. I am always surprised to hear my own voice because it is quite a bit higher in pitch than I am used to. In addition, when you are talking, much of what you do in changes in tone are so natural you don’t about them- you just do them. When you listen to it back, however, you have to pay attention to the changes in tone- you then surprise yourself.
I admit I miss the Sanity Squad. Always thought you sounded very calm, still that New York speed though .
I like my voice well enough. I am from Kentucky and have a distinct southern accent and it’s one that I like. My voice isn’t nasal or shrill and I have a lowish tone to it. I have been described by more than one person as soft spoken.