While many people avoid listening to their voices after sending voice messages, especially via the WhatsApp application, others hate it completely. What is the reason?
To answer this question, researchers at Mass Eye and Ear Hospital, a teaching hospital at Harvard University, asked people to listen to their voices on a recorder. They found that 58% of them did not want to listen to themselves; While 39% of them said that “their voices are annoying,” for several reasons, the most important of which is the loss of sound quality when hearing them through a device, unlike listening to ourselves directly when talking to others.
Two ways to transmit sound
For her part, Tricia Ashby Scabies, director of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, said, “There are two ways to transmit sound when you speak,” according to what was reported by the Washington Post.
She also said, "We listen to ourselves through air conduction and bone conduction and as a result, we actually hear a deeper, fuller sound. When we listen to a recording, we only hear ourselves through air conduction. Therefore, the sound loses its quality."
Air conduction uses the pinna (outer part of the ear), ear canal, tympanic membrane (eardrum) and ossicles (small bones inside the ear) to amplify sound, while bone conduction transmits sound vibration to the inner ear and from one ear to the other.
Therefore, our voice is internal, low, but in recording, where air alone carries the sound, it may take on a higher frequency.
In turn, Matthew Nauenheim, a physician at the University of Massachusetts Eye and Ear and assistant professor of otolaryngology, said, “If you listen to a recording of your voice, yes, this is actually what other people hear.”
He also pointed out that discomfort with our own voice can sabotage our expectations, and thus our self-confidence, which he calls “vocal confrontation.”
This phenomenon was first studied by psychologists Philip Holzman and Clyde Rosie in the 1960s.
These two researchers found that when people were shown what their voices actually looked like, they tended to focus on the negative qualities of their voices during recordings.