Hate the sound of your voice? Expert explains TikTok’s viral realisation

Have you ever heard a recording of your voice and cringed at what you’ve heard?

A viral realisation that we don’t sound how we think we do to others has TikTok users creating videos, mocking how we think we sound vs. how we actually sound.

TikTokers are cringing at the sound of their own voices and have been depicting the scenario in which they hear a recording of their voice which is then played back to them in a much higher pitch than they expect.

Think about how often you send a voice note or watch a video of yourself speaking and shudder at the unrecognisable voice you’re listening to.

Well, you're not alone in this as hundreds of comments support the claims, sharing their insecurity about listening to the sound of their own voice.

One person wrote: "Always dread listening to my voice notes," while another added in agreement: “I hate recording myself.”

Someone else wrote: “I absolutely HATE hearing myself!!”

But why do we seem to dislike thesound of our voices so much?

Ashish Shah, an audiologist at The Hearing Care Partnership explains why our voices sound so different and unlike ourselves when we hear them back.

“When we speak, the sound of our voice is transferred to our ears in two ways, externally by air conduction, and internally through our bones," Shah said.

"The bone conduction transfers lower frequencies that air-conducted sound does not, and is what gives our voices the lower tone we are used to.”

“When we speak to someone else, they are only hearing our voice through air-conducted sound, so they will be hearing us in a higher frequency, and so the same goes for when we listen back to our own voices via a recording."

He explained that when hearing a recording of our voice, we're not used to hearing ourselves in this way because we do not have the bone-conducted sound to add the lower frequencies."

"And this is why we often find people saying they dislike the sound of their voice when they hear it played back to them. Our voice forms a large part of our identity, so when we realise that we don’t sound the way we think we do, it can throw us off.”

A previous study found that when a group of participants were asked to rate the attractiveness of several different voice recordings, that secretly included their own, they rated their voice much higher when they did not realise it was theirs, according to the Audiologist.

"Think about it, how often do you judge or spend much time thinking about the sound of someone else's voice? Generally, we don’t analyse the voices of others, so you can almost guarantee that people are not analysing yours.

"The judgement we pass on the sound of our voice is wholly based on it not being what we know or expect of ourselves and therefore it makes us uncomfortable, but the reality is, this is the only way others know us.”

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