Hearing the sound of your voice played back to you can be a pretty jarring experience. For instance, I always thought I had the gravelly voice of someone destined to be a rock star. Clearly, that was not the case. In his latest video, SciShow's Hank Green explains why there's such a horrible disconnect between how we sound to ourselves and how the world hears us.
As Green notes in the video, the main reason your voice sounds different to you is somewhat obvious: It's coming from inside your head. Sounds you hear from other sources pass through the various canals of the ear into the inner-ear chamber. But, when you hear your own voice, it also bounces around and transmits vibrations (through your bone and flesh) directly into the inner ear. These bits are much better at transmitting lower frequencies than higher frequencies, which means your voice sounds deeper to you than it does to other people. And, if that's not weird enough, there's the whole shock of hearing a recording of your voice that sounds entirely different from the voice you've been hearing your entire life.
So, if you're not a huge fan of hearing your own voice, you are certainly not alone; it happens to pretty much everyone. And, sorry, you really do sound like that.
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