Why Does Your Voice Sound Different in a Recording?

Whether you think you have a nice or an ugly voice, there’s not much you can do about the feeling you get when you hear it, because our voice sounds different to us than it does to others. There’s a reason for this, and in this article we explain why our voice sounds different in a recording.

“What the %$#@! But my voice is sexier! What’s going on? Who is that? Is that my voice? But… I hear it differently. Oh God. I’ll never speak again.” Do you identify with that? If so, you’ve probably had some pretty intense moments of distress when you first heard your recorded voice. And it happens over and over, unless you’re a prodigious singer or one of those rare people who actually likes their voice. So if you want to make your voice sound better, you’ll need to work on it with phoniatricians, voice coaches, and singing teachers. But even with a voice like Whitney Houston’s or Andrea Bocelli’s, your voice will sound different to you than it does when you hear it from outside. So why?

Why Does Our Voice Sound Different in a Recording?

The question of why our voice sounds different in a recording is old and has been answered a thousand times, just like the clichéd question about the chicken and the egg. Still, the question keeps coming up, and the answer remains the same: when you hear your recorded voice, it sounds higher-pitched, as if it’s missing all the low tones and reverb that make your voice sound better to you.

The reason lies in the fact that when we speak, our voice takes two different paths to our auditory organ, the organ of Corti. Located in the cochlea, inside the inner ear, this organ is responsible for converting the vibrational energy of sound waves into nervous energy.

The first path is the best known and, especially, the most considered: the external one. The sound that comes out of our mouth is carried by the air to our ears, and it is conducted from the external auditory canal, through the eardrum, and to the cochlea. This process is known as air conduction, but since the mouth is so close to the ear, the process is almost instantaneous. This is important because the second path that sound takes to our cochlea seems more direct.

When we speak, in addition to expelling sound out of our body, we are also directing it inward, and it travels through our bone structure via the tissues of the head, which, due to their characteristics, reinforce low-frequency vibrations, giving our voice that deeper tone. Since this pathway predominates, we hear the result of this internal sound conduction.

So the next time someone asks you why our voice sounds different in a recording, tell them: Because microphones don’t record the reverberation of your bones, but rather the sound waves transmitted through the air. When we hear our recorded voice, we are removing the most predominant and familiar phase: internal conduction. And with it, the low frequencies that make our voice less embarrassing to us.