Why does it seem that people dislike recordings of their voice more than photos of themselves?
Personally, I'm not a fan of either, so it's always been a little interesting to me to run into people that are more averse to hearing a recording of their voice.
(Also is there a dedicated term for audio-only voice recordings? 🤨)
I suspect it's because we see accurate representations of ourselves in every mirror. With voice though what we hear normally is distorted by the resonence of our jawbone, so hearing the version everyone else does when it's played back from a recording is alien and weird.
Nobody ever sees us mirrored though
Might make for an interesting experiment to take picture of someone in a mirror and through the mirror (pinhole or two-way mirror) and then ask people which of the two is real and which is the doctored one. Neither are edited of course but one would look wrong for anyone who met the person in the photos.
I suspect this is basically it, however I've often thought similar could be said of one's appearance; as it's distorted by different lighting, whether your clothing's gotten wrinkled up a certain way, the wind's messed up your hair, or you accidentally smudged makeup or some dirt on you somewhere. Although that all is also typically easier to adjust (give or take the lighting and wind) than your voice, so that undoubtedly plays into it.
It’s easier to change your hairstyle or makeup than it is your voice. Most people also hear their voice about an octave lower in their head. It resonates differently internally than it does out in the air. A recording of your voice is like looking in a mirror and seeing something different than what you see most of the time.
I think I sound reasonable talking. On recordings I sound like the gayest, campest homo in the fucking universe.
Even though I'm gay it's still cringe af.
It's fucking hilarious to think I went years denying being gay but when I listen to my voice it's like "WTF - it's SO fuckign obvious!"
Dude same but with my Mexican accent. I know I have a tad of an accent but it's not bad in my head, the moment I hear my voice in a recording it's like I'm listening to fucking speedy Gonzales or whatever his cousin slow rat was.
Every time I hear my voice it sounds like I just huffed a liter of helium. Apparently my wife doesn't mind but damn man. My shit is ANNOYING
“Gay” voice is a strange thing. What it sounds like in the head is nothing like what it sounds like to everyone else.
I once heard that the mirror thing is why we tend to dislike photos of ourselves - it's because we are not mirrored there and this unconsciously looks odd to us.
Fittingly to this theory, I know a lot of people who think they only look good in selfies and no one else can make a good picture of them. Maybe that's connected.
Most people also hear their voice about an octave lower in their head.
Is this true? It's the other way around for me. Well, I don't know if it's an octave, but my voice sounds significantly deeper in recordings than I hear it as I'm speaking.
https://gizmodo.com/why-your-voice-sounds-different-inside-your-head-1620981647
“This added resistance causes the waveform frequency to drop, lowering the pitch of the sound you hear internally”
Do you have a low voice? I’m a bass and I’m the same way. My voice in recordings always sounds lower (and less expressive!) than it is in my head.
That is why they also mirror selfies, so it matches what you see in the mirror.
I think there's another aspect that people haven't really pointed out yet: that most speakers and microphones are trash. With cameras and screens, we've gotten really good at capturing real life in pictures and then displaying those pictures. But microphones and speakers are fundamentally limited by physics. And most microphones and speakers that everyday people would have access to are limited by physics to be awful at picking up sounds accurately.
Try listening to the same song on a desktop speaker vs. earphones. Earphones just simply don't reproduce the song to the same quality as the desktop speakers. They are terrible at reproducing low tones, and the balance is usually wack. Or, for instance, try talking to a friend via a Zoom call vs. talking in person. You can pretty easily tell the difference. You can get expensive equipment to capture and reproduce sounds more accurately, which is what streamers and youtubers tend to do, but then that's very expensive and not really something that ordinary people would be willing to invest in.
That's not to say that the other responses are wrong and that the resonance of the jawbone doesn't affect how we perceive our own voices (they're correct, and the resonance does affect our own perception), but simply saying that it's just the resonance is missing out on the crucial detail that our voice recordings are fundamentally trash to begin with.
As an analogy, you can try taking a selfie using an old laptop's front-facing camera. You probably won't like how you look either - you'd look either sickly pale or drunken red, eyebags appear out of nowhere, the distortion of the lens makes you look fat. All of these qualities aren't because you are any of these things in real life. It's simply that laptop cameras are bad. Same is true for microphones and speakers.
As an analogy, you can try taking a selfie using an old laptop’s front-facing camera. You probably won’t like how you look either - you’d look either sickly pale or drunken red, eyebags appear out of nowhere, the distortion of the lens makes you look fat. All of these qualities aren’t because you are any of these things in real life. It’s simply that laptop cameras are bad. Same is true for microphones and speakers.
I think you make a good point with the hardware aspects of this, and on this last point I can't help but be a little amused, as while it's often very true, personally I sometimes prefer the lower res quality of a laptop camera as it can help obfuscate some of the finer details I don't much care for. It's basically a hardware lo-fi filter, and I appreciate it not catching every pore. 😂
I'd guess lack of familiarity. Your voice sounds different than what you hear in your head so a recording can seem very strange, whereas seeing a picture or reflection is much more frequent for many people.
Yeah, growing up before digital photography was common, loads of people hated how they looked in photographs. When you only saw a couple of photos of yourself in a year, it was really easy to be horrified and ask "is that really what I look like". Now you can take ten selfies in a row and you know that how you look varies massively depending on the angle or lighting. And anyone who has to regularly work with their own recorded voice generally gets over the cringe pretty quickly.
Your voice sounds different because you hear your own voice through your skull which adds bass. Recorded voices sound higher pitched.
It sounds so very nasal... Like I am deliberately routing all voice data through 3 sinuses.
The way your voice sounds inside your head is impacted by the way that your voice vibrates and reverberates inside your skull, producing a deeper and more resonant sound. Everyone tends to think recordings of their voice sound tinny because it is not in the same deep register they are used to.
Similarly, people tend to only be used to seeing their likeness in the mirror, meaning that other images of them which are not mirrored can seem as unfamiliar as a whole other person.
Seeing myself on video gives me the same feeling as hearing my voice.
On a side note, imagine being the first person to ever hear a recording of their own voice. Would they have known that how we hear ourselves isn't what others hear, or would they chalk it up to a flaw in the nascent technology?
That's a very interesting question. I wonder if there were any articles written about the subject at the time.
Your voice resonates through your bones and sounds very different to you personally. So when you hear a recording it is a different voice than you're used to hearing.
A photo is a photo, you know what you look like. Some people just don't like having photos taken. The way some people don't really look in the mirror that much.
Photos don't convey intelligence, while speech does.
My face is pretty stupid, bro.
I'd assume it's because you see yourself whenever you look in a mirror, and that image matches what a picture of you looks like. However when you talk, what you hear doesn't match what other people hear, so hearing a recording of the 'external' sound of your voice sounds more foreign, and that can lead to discomfort.
I have central auditory processing disorder, capd. Seeing a visual is instantaneous, clear, easy. People speaking is torturous, brain can't process, requires lot of work, confusion, translating. For me, visuals are external, but even external sounds become internal, physical. Activation of the limbic system, anxiety, fear, can lead to hearing voices. Prefrontal cortex, I think, is where brain stops internalizing sound as stress, fear. Why some people with adhd who hear voices take a small, mild dose of Ritalin at night. Ritalin means less limbic, less fear.
Not an answer to your question, but I think different areas of the brain process sound, visuals. Different mechanisms. I'd be interested to know if someone could shed light on this.
I've got a very mild visual processing disorder. Sometimes I'll look at a picture of something and just be like "wtf is that" for a solid minute or two before I see the obvious object/scene that it is.
voice dysphoria
Because we had been hearing our offseted pitch our whole lives and now we know it's worst than what we thought
The distance between how we perceive ourselves and how the world perceives us is the very foundation that cringe makes its home atop.
We hear ourselves all the time, but we don't sound at all to ourselves the way we actually sound. We don't have a sort of internal picture of ourselves to create dissonance with our reflection or photographs in the same way we do with our voices. It's that dissonance that makes us distrust or dislike hearing ourselves as we actually sound because that isn't the voice we identify with internally.
Maybe because you hear your voice every time you speak but rarely in recordings so the difference is more jarring. Most people don't spend all day looking at a mirror but probably see photos of themselves more often than they hear recordings.
It's because I sound like a baritone woman. Everybody calls me ma'am on the phone. When I was younger my parents thought I was gay because of my voice. I would prefer to sound like Gilbert Godfrey over this shit voice 😽
Wish granted, you're now mute because he sure doesn't sound like much anymore ;)
Maybe in part because when you talk, you’re constantly making subconscious live adjustments to your voice based on feedback from hearing it through your head. So when you hear it recorded and it doesn’t sound like what you’re expecting, that auto-correcting part of your subconscious wants to jump in and adjust it.
Cause I freaking sound weird when I listen to the recording of my voice compared to the way I usually sound to my self, that's why.
You get used to seeing yourself in a mirror.
Most people don't listen to their voice nearly as often as they look in a mirror.
I was interviewed this morning on my local stations morning radio show and I refuse to listen to it lol.
Ooh, what about?
You do?? 😦
Like, actually, legitimately?
Except when on shrooms, yeah. Do you not have mirrors in every bathroom?