Hearing My Own Voice

  So like I said yesterday, I will be posting a video featuring some of the same ideas I had with that post. One thing I was pleasantly introduced to yet again in doing that was the pleasure of recording and editing just my own voice. I think if anyone has ever had to do a project where you needed to hear yourself speak, they can definitely understand the weirdness that comes from hearing yourself. It makes you uncomfortable, you begin to question your entire existence, and you cringe at the way you speak. You then begin to question if you’ve always sounded like that? Do people really hear me this way? Why does it happen? We hear ourselves all the time when we talk. Try it, you know that you sound a certain way when words leave your mouth. Yet, when you do a voice recording and listen back to it, you sound completely different. It’s off putting and definitely wacky.


I learned that there is a very big thing that happens between us speaking and the sounds reaching our own ears. As you speak, the sounds resonate through your skull’s bones as they come up to your ears. Meaning that the sound becomes adjusted, sounding deeper and more present to your internal senses. It’s like some natural human function is doing EQ and audio work on the sounds as it comes to your ears so that your own voice sounds pleasant to you. The people around you unfortunately do not benefit from this way cooler sounding version of your own voice. That is also why hearing it is so weird. You’ve spent your entire life hearing your voice as one way so when you hear it without that internal adjustment, it’s foreign. You’ve literally never heard that voice before, to then hear that new voice come out of a familiar place such as your own mouth it becomes very uncomfortable for you to process. One thing that you know should be yours and yours alone for the entirety of your life has now been swapped out for something that wasn’t supposed to be there. It’s definitely very jarring. 


As someone who has been editing videos of myself for a long time now, I still have that little hint of that feeling in the back of my mind whenever I sit down in my editing software. In the beginning it was pretty bad. I found myself unable to sit down and edit for more than a few minutes at a time before I had to take a break just to talk to myself to feel a little better. A little vain and perhaps even narcissistic, but the comfort I found in hearing the voice that I supposedly had was a necessary coping mechanism for me. Nowadays, I’m much better about it. I was able to edit the short 8 minute video in under 30 minutes completely uninterrupted and the whole video is literally just me talking. Obviously, I’ve spent many hours over the last few years hearing my own voice so perhaps my tolerance levels have been made higher through that, but it’s definitely really cool to see the improvement I’ve had.


Not really much more to say on my point. I wish I had some sick tips and tricks to help with the process, but my process was really just one of brute force. The sheer amount of times I’ve had to hear myself is why I’m able to not let it affect me at all. So I guess if anyone has any tips out there, feel free to share in the comments. I would love to hear about your experiences with this as I feel that there are so many ways to deal with it that I never got to do in my time. If not, I do appreciate you for reading this far and I will be back tomorrow with another post.

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