Lucy Devine
If you've ever heard your voice on a recording and recoiled in shock and horror, then you might be interested to know there's actually a reason why.
Despite hearing our own voice when we speak, there's something so uncomfortable about listening to it on a recording or video.
Not only are we left cringing, but we also find ourselves apologising for our voice to anyone else listening too.
So what is it about listening to ourselves on tape that makes us feel so weird?
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Well, it's all to do with the difference between something called air conduction and bone conduction.
When we speak, we of course hear our own voice, but it sounds different to when we listen to it on a recording. This is because while speaking, we hear the noise through vibrations in both the tiny bones within our ears and skull and through the vibrations in the air.
The University of Tokyo explains that when we're not talking and we simply listen to our voices on a video, for example, we're hearing only the air-conducted sound.
Hence why it sounds familiar, but also a little different to what we hear when we talk out loud.
While the bone conducted sound produces lower frequencies, the air conducted noise is a little higher. It's not what we expect our voice to sound like, which is why many of us find it so uncomfortable.
Dr Silke Paulmann, a psychologist at the University of Essex, told the Guardian: “I would speculate that the fact that we sound more high-pitched than what we think we should leads us to cringe as it doesn’t meet our internal expectations; our voice plays a massive role in forming our identity and I guess no one likes to realise that you’re not really who you think you are.”
Meanwhile, a study conducted in 1966 by psychologists Phil Holzemann and Clyde Rousey suggested another reason why we don't like the sound of our voice on a recording.
It could be because listening to our voice on tape 'presents qualities in the voice which the subject had not intended to express' such as sadness or anxiety.
Marc Pell, a neuroscientist at McGill University, said: "When we hear our isolated voice which is disembodied from the rest of our behaviour, we may go through the automatic process of evaluating our own voice in the way we routinely do with other people’s voices.
"... I think we then compare our own impressions of the voice to how other people must evaluate us socially, leading many people to be upset or dissatisfied with the way they sound because the impressions formed do not fit with social traits they wish to project.”