Why Do You Hate The Sound Of Your Own Voice?

Why Do You Hate The Sound Of Your Own Voice?

Most of us cringe at hearing the sound of our own voice played back, but why is this?

In their last video, AsapTHOUGHT, rounded up a few people to listen to their own voices being played back to them and to no surprise none of them liked hearing themselves.  Apparently, hating the sound of your own voice is a pretty universal reaction.

Why Do You Hate The Sound Of Your Own Voice?

Why is there such a horrible difference between how we sound to ourselves and how the world hears us? The phenomenon is all to do with the vibrations inside our bodies that no one else hears. When you hear your own voice, it also bounces around and transmits vibrations (through your bone and flesh) directly into the inner ear.

When we hear other people speak however, our eardrums and inner ears vibrate from the sound waves coming in from outside; vibrations that the brain converts into sound.

As a result when we hear our voices being played back to us, it sounds thin and alien because it has lost that rich, and deeper undertones added by our internal hearing system.

The good news is that your voice isn’t annoying for your friends and acquaintances at all. It’s the one they’ve grown accustomed to and they’ve never heard your voice the way it sounds to you inside your head.

Watch AsapTHOUGHT video below and amuse yourself at people’s reaction to the sound of their own voice being played back to them:

Now you know that when you hear a recording of your own voice, you are essentially hearing the external stimulus only and exactly how other people hear you normally, without internal vibrations from deep within our bodies that get added to the mix.

Even though the participants in this video when first hearing their voices being played back reacted with cringe and grimace, as we all do, according to a study in 2013 we may subconsciously prefer it.

These same participants then were asked to listen to a handful of recorded voices, unaware that one of the voices recorded was their own, and rate them according to attractiveness, from 1 to 7, 1 being an ugly voice and 7 being a beautiful voice in their opinion.

Turns out that people didn’t dislike their own voices as much as they first thought, on average they rated their own voices at 4.7, where everyone else was giving them a 3.6. Maybe we all tend to overreact at first when we hear our voices but deep down we actually don’t mind them so much.

Voice attractiveness has been said to be linked to good genes and therefore to good health and so it’s possible that our voices may be linked to our sexual attractiveness. This is further reinforced with both women and men in romantic settings changing their voices, with women lowering their voices and men raising them in order to increase their attractiveness.

In conclusion, even if you think your recorded voice sounds terrible, it might be more attractive than you think.