Why Do We Hate Listening To Our Own Voice Recordings?

sirwinchester (75)in #sirwinchester • 8 years ago (edited)

We all have an idea of what our own voice sounds like - I mean, we hear it a thousand times a day, right?
But as soon as we listen to a recording of our own voice, we cringe.

Most people strongly dislike hearing the sound of their own voice - why is that?

We hear other people's voices (and music, and ony other sounds) through air conduction.
The sound travels through our ear and makes our ear drums vibrate slightly, which in turn makes tiny bones in our ear (ossicles) intensify the sound waves before they enter our cochlea - the auditory part of our inner ear, which is fluid-filled and shaped like a spiral.
The cochlea is equipped with thousands of little hair cells that transfer the vibration into electrical signals, which are then sent to our brain and give us the ability to hear sound.

Now when we hear our own voice while we talk, we hear the sound a lot differently.
The sound reaches us through bone conduction - we create sounds by vibrating our vocal chords, and these vibrations get transported to our skull.
This vibration also affects the fluid in our conchlea, since the inner ear is located inside our (vibrating) skull.
Our bones transmit low frequencies more effectively, so in general our own voice sounds lower to ourselves than it actually is when we talk.

When we listen to our own voice recorded, we listen to it through air conduction and not bone conduction.

Our voice appears to be much higher to us, and generally just sounds a lot different than what we're used to hear!
Humans generally dislike things that are "not like they used to" more - this is due to the so-called Mere Exposure Effect.
So don't worry, you might think that your voice sounds terrible to everone around you, but actually, that's how they always hear your voice and they probably like it.

But why do we actually like certain voices more than others?

This has evolutionary reasons - an attractive voice in males is associated with a more V-shaped upper body (Shoulder-Waist ratio), and also linked to higher testosterone levels.
In women, high estrogen levels are linked to a perception of a more attractive voice. Studies have also suggested that female voices sound particularly attractive during ovulation.
So the attractiveness of voices is linked to evolutionary reasons and goes hand in hand with our ancient instincts of looking for a fertile partner with good genes.
We also associate certain aspects of a voice (high, low, raspy, nasal, shaky...) with certain characteristics, and therefore the voice plays quite an important role when getting the first impression of someone.

While everybody thinks they hate listening to their own voice, a very interesting study has shown quite different results:

The participants were individually asked to record their voice. Then they were distracted with some tasks.
Afterwards, they listened to the voice recordings of the other people, and rated them from 1 to 7.
What they didn't know: Their own voice recording was mixed in between the others as well!
And surprisingly, the participants rated their own voice higher (= more attractive) than other people did - a score of 4.7 compared to 3.6, how the other rated their voice.