FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Identity

Why You Hate the Sound of Your Own Voice

We asked an ENT surgeon why it's so loathsome to listen to recordings of yourself speaking.
Photo by Chelsea Victoria via Stocksy

One of the things that makes me most proud about Broadly—apart from the excellent quality of our illustrations—is our focus on original reporting.

What this means in practice is that I spend a lot of time calling people for comment, or interviewing people. I record almost all of these calls. My Dictaphone, which I guard with a Kris Jenner-esque maternal ferocity, rarely leaves my sightline—so fearful am I that someone will delete my recordings before I have time to transcribe them.

Advertisement

Once, a polite man I'd never met from a department I've never worked with asked if he could borrow my Dictaphone, and because I'm British and awkward I felt like I had to say yes, and then he didn't return the Dictaphone and I got progressively more distressed until my colleague Zing, smelling my panic, recovered the Dictaphone for me and placed it on my desk with a look that simultaneously bespoke a deep compassion and quiet empathy.

Read more: A Hostage Negotiator Explains How to Tell Someone You Gave Them an STI

This also means I spend much more time than I'd like listening to the sound of my own voice. I've thought a lot about how best to describe my voice, and the best I can do is that I sound like Emma Watson doing an extremely bad impression of a British accent (Yes, I know she's British). But more nasal.


Watch: How to Get Over Your Ex


Thing is, pretty much everyone hates the sound of their own voice. It's just one of those things you hate, like hangovers or early mornings or early mornings when you're hungover. But why?

"There are two ways of getting sound to your brain," explains Professor Douglas Hartley, an ENT surgeon and associate professor in otolaryngology at the University of Nottingham. "The first way is by air vibrating in your ear-drum via the air conduction pathway, which goes to the inner ear. That's the way you hear the people around you speak."

The second way we can hear speech—specifically how we hear our own speech—is through the bones in our own head.

Advertisement

"When you speak, the vibrations directly vibrate the bones of your skull, and the vibrations go into the inner ear," Hartley explains. "That pathway is called the bone conduction pathway. When you speak it's unique, because it's a combination of sound from your vocal chord and voice box via air conduction, but also via the bone conduction that goes through your skull."

For More Stories Like This, Sign-Up for Our Newsletter

This accounts for the dysphoria we experience while hearing our voices on tape for the first time. "Your voice is unique, and no one else ever hears it the way you hear it," Hartley says. "What you get through a voice recording is what everyone else hears. So suddenly it's not you, and therefore you don't like it. We're not good as human beings with dealing with things that are very close to us, but not quite like us.

That's why you find it annoying."

Ask-Hole is a regular column in which Broadly investigates questions you probably already knew the answers to, but we didn't, so here it is. Do you have a question about honestly anything at all? Ask us about it.