[Intro]
You’ve all experienced it, but imagine experiencing it every day.
And, like, doing it for a living.
I’m talking about the embarrassment of hearing what your voice really sounds like, in a video
or some other recording.
I listen to myself talk on SciShow and Vlogbrothers all the dang time, so it's something that
I've gotten used to, but I remember when I first started doing this, I HATED the sound
of my own voice.
It sounds like another person to me, and not in a good way.
I mean, it’d be great if it turned out that I sounded like Reid Reimers --
Reid: Yeaaaahhh!
Hank: -- but the fact is, to other people, I’m a little more high-pitched and nasally
than I thought I was.
But it’s that way for everybody!
So why does your voice sound different to you than to everybody else?
It all goes back to the way that we learn how to talk -- which is super-complicated
-- but it largely involves listening to other people talk, and then mimicking those noises
with our mouths.
That involves matching what our vocal folds and mouths are doing with what our ears are
hearing.
However, we hear our own voices very differently than we hear other people's voices, simply
because they're INSIDE OF OUR HEAD.
When you hear your voice as you talk, you’re really hearing a couple of different things
at once.
You’re hearing the sound that's coming out of your mouth, which is being conducted by
air, and then traveling through your auditory canal and your eardrum and then your middle
ear and finally your inner ear.
But you’re also hearing the sound bouncing around inside your own head, which is conducted
by your flesh and bones directly to your inner ear.
And all that thick, fleshy stuff in your head does a better job of transmitting lower-frequency
vibrations than higher tones, so our voices that we hear through our own heads actually
sound deeper and more resonant.
But the big difference is simply that, when you hear it recorded, you're not hearing your
voice as you've heard it your whole life...you're hearing it as other people hear it.
This doesn't mean that it's worse, it just feels really odd to hear your voice without
all of the components you're used to, and that can be unsettling since, y'know, you've
been listening to yourself talk for, I presume, a pretty long time.
I hope, though, that you never get tired of the sound of my voice.
Cause I could talk to you all day.
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