Von Melissa Dahl
Foto: druvo/Getty Images
So you hate the sound of your own voice. This complaint has become something of a cliché, perhaps especially on media Twitter, where journalists are routinelyconfessthat they aredelaya transcription of an interview because hearing her own recorded voice is like thatunbearable. And yet, of course, hate itself existed long before Twitter; studies outdie 1960erhave shown that people dislike hearing recordings of their own voices, while hearing renditions of friends' or strangers' voices did not bother them them.
It's about hearingOf,in other words, which you find particularly objectionable. And that's pretty weird when you think about it. You listen to yourself all day. Why would a recording of your voice make you feel? uncomfortable?
The unfamiliarity is in the truest sense of the word all in your head, although you are not imagining anything. When you hear yourself speak, you are essentially hearing a distorted version of your own voice; On the other hand, when you hear a recording of your voice - I'm very sorry to say that - you hear yourself as everyone else hears you. The distinction here is caused by the physiology of your own skull. In a way, you hear yourself in surround sound, in that the sound waves of your own speech reach your ears via two separate paths. There is air conduction, which means that when you speak, sound travels through the air into your ear canals, causing your eardrums to vibrate. From there, the sound is carried through the small bones of the ear until it reaches the cochlea, the sensory organ that contains nerves that connect to the auditory regions of the brain, where the sound waves are interpreted into something meaningful. In this way, you not only hear your own voice, but every sound at.
But when you hear yourself speak, the sound is also coming from an extra speaker of sorts: the bones of your skull. This is called bone conduction, which means that when your vocal cords vibrate to produce speech, this movement also causes the bones of the skull to vibrate, which is also registered in the cochlea. bone conductiontransmitslower frequencies compared to air conduction, which is one reason your voice sounds so unfamiliar when played to you. When you hear the sound through your own head, your brain perceives it as deeper than it really is because the transmission through the skull created that sound Away.
Studies from the late 1960s suggest that people are so surprised at how a recording of their voice sounds that they don't recognize it. One in 1967learnfound that only 38 percent of volunteers could immediately identify their own voice, even though it was a different onelearnThe study, published earlier this year, found that 55 percent of participants were able to recognize themselves when given a longer amount of time - 15 seconds - to respond. But recent research has undermined this notion of unfamiliarity. in 2008,researcherreported that people couldIDtheir own voices with an accuracy rate of up to 96 percent; a later onelearn, published in 2010, found a similar competency in its participants, who could identify their voices about 89 to 93 percent of the time. It's not too hard to figure out why people have gotten better at it: smartphones and other technologies are making it easy to record high-quality voice memos or videos, so people just have more ways to hear themselves today than they used to 1960er.
fine, you say,but just because I know how I sound doesn't mean I like it. On the contrary – chances are you areAgainlike it very much. In a fascinating waylearnBeginning in 2013, researchers at Albright College and Penn State Harrisburg played a variety of different voices to their study participants and asked them to rate how attractive they were likely to find the invisible speaker. The twist, however, was that the experimenters didn't tell the volunteers that they would also be evaluating recordings of themownVoices. Their results showed that people tended to unknowingly prefer their own recorded voices; they rated their own voice more attractive compared to the other voices they heard, and their ratings for the attractiveness of their own voice were, on average, higher than the ratings other people gave them. Incidentally, the researchers note that the volunteers were informed afterwards that one of the voices they heard was their own and that they were surprised by this Knowledge. (As an aside, in the aforementioned studies where people accurately identified their voices, the researchers told them from the start that one of the voices they would hear would be their own. The scientists behind this 2013 study, however, gave gave no such hint to your volunteers and indicated that unless you tell people to listen, they probably won't recognize your own Voices.)
So you like your voice, says this study, even if you don't know you do. You probably even like your voice more thanIwould like your vote. And yet so many people still say they cringe when they hear recordings of themselves. How can this May be?
The psychology and physiology of what makes us flinch isn't well understood, which is a shame, especially considering how common the feeling is in everyday life. ("Please clap.") But you might think of a flinch as a shock of self-confidence. Some psychologists and philosophers see a divide between the experience of the "lived body" and the "physical body," arguing that emotions that evoke self-awareness cause the two to collide. As a pair of researchers wrote in a2006 PapierAn Embarrassment:
[I]in moments of disruption, such as B. in illness, clumsiness or the influence of other people's judgments, the living body becomes the object of our attention. In these moments the body appears as the physical body. … The corporeal body can therefore be conceptualized as the body-subject facing itself as a body-object. Embarrassment and the “confident” emotions always seem to occur in dynamics where the lived body is momentarily reduced to the physicalBody.
Put another way, most of the time most of us live inside our own heads imagining that the person we think we are presenting to the world is actually the person seeing the world. Pitiful moments snap us out of this fantasy and force us to take, at least momentarily, an outside perspective on ourselves. In the same 2006 publication, the researchers -- Brent Dean Robbins of Daemen College and Holly Parlavecchio of Allegheny College -- included a lengthy first-person account of a college student's most recent pathetic moment: slips and falls in front of the entire dining room. As the story is told, the student switches from first person to second person description of the story fallen:
As I fell, everything felt like it was moving in slow motion, but it happened so quickly and unexpectedly. ... [Y]you could feel yourself falling physically but you couldn't do anything else to stop it and you knew you were going to hit the ground but it came so fast it was before you realized what happened happens.
Similarly, hearing a recording of your voice draws you into that observer's perspective. It's a lot like seepictures of you, and how oddly different you often look from the version of yourself you see in the Spiegel.
If hearing your own voice doesn't bother you, it may simply mean that you have a higher self-esteem than the rest of us, as science writer Rolf Degen hastheorized. Or it may just mean you're used to it - research has shown that radio announcers, for example, can recognize their own voice almost perfectly, and the more familiar people are with something, the betterthey tend to like the thing.But coming to terms with the sound of your own stupid voice can also mean coming to terms with the uncomfortable truth that the "you" Who exists in your own head is often very different from the “you” the world sees and hears. For my part, I don't feel up to the task at the moment, so I think I'll postpone this particular interview Transcription just a bit longer.
tags:
- shudder
- embarrassments
- clumsiness
- science from us