“I hate the sound of my own voice”

So why is it that we hate the sound of our own voice?

There are a number of explanations for this (none of which we can take credit for – much smarter people than us have worked this out).

In July 2018 there was an article published by The Guardian which outlined the reasons why.

With us all enduring more video conference calls than ever before as a reuslt of COVID-19 we’ve become much more aware of how we sound, and much more exposed to hearing our own voice than ever before.

Personally, I got to the point where I accepted what recordings of my own voice sounded like by realising that it’s what everyone else has to listen to when I’m speaking – but it turns out that this may not be the case.

The article from The Guardian is worth a read but there are a few key points that it highlights:

• Your recorded voice sounds different from what you are used to hearing yourself as a result of the way the sound is transferred. Your perception of how you sound is altered by the fact that air and sound is transferred internally through our bones. This is not in fact what other people hear.
• There is a disconnect between when we speak and when we hear our own voice – the discomfort we feel at hearing our own voice can partially be attribted to the fact that we have lost control of our own voice and, to quote the article, it appears that our ‘voice is running wild’. Given that we use the voices of others as a huge part of forming perceptions of their personality, when we hear our own voice we start to do the same thing. The conflict arises when the perception we create doesn’t match our own view of ourselves.

There’s a lot more interesting detail in The Guardian ariticle.