It is a common human experience to hear one’s own voice differently than others do. Understanding why your voice sounds distinct to you compared to how it sounds to others involves examining the science behind sound transmission and perception.
How You Hear Your Own Voice
When you speak, sound reaches your inner ear through two primary pathways: air conduction and bone conduction. Air conduction is the most familiar way we hear sounds from the outside world. Sound waves travel through the air, enter your outer ear, cause your eardrum to vibrate, and then these vibrations pass through three tiny bones in your middle ear—the malleus, incus, and stapes—before reaching the cochlea. The cochlea, a fluid-filled, spiral-shaped organ, converts these vibrations into electrical impulses that your brain interprets as sound. This is the pathway through which others primarily hear your voice.
Bone conduction is a unique way you hear your own voice, involving vibrations that travel directly through the bones of your skull to your inner ear. When you speak, your vocal cords create vibrations that resonate through the tissues and bones of your head. These internal vibrations bypass the outer and middle ear, directly stimulating the cochlea. Your inner ear receives sound information from both the air-conducted and bone-conducted pathways.
Why Your Voice Sounds Different to You
The difference in how you perceive your own voice compared to how others hear it stems from bone conduction’s impact on pitch perception. Bone conduction transmits lower frequencies more efficiently than air conduction. When you hear your own voice, the sound reaching your inner ear includes these additional lower frequencies transmitted through your skull. This combination of air-conducted sound and the added lower frequencies from bone conduction makes your voice sound deeper or fuller to yourself.
The voice others hear is predominantly transmitted through air conduction, which lacks these amplified lower frequencies. Consequently, your voice sounds comparatively higher in pitch to an external listener than it does to you. This is why your internal perception of your voice often seems richer and deeper than the voice others experience. The brain integrates these dual sensory inputs, creating your unique internal auditory experience of your voice.
The Unfamiliar Sound of Your Recorded Voice
Many people find the sound of their recorded voice unfamiliar, or even jarring, when they first hear it. This reaction occurs because a recording captures only the air-conducted sound of your voice. A recorded voice lacks the additional lower frequencies that you perceive through bone conduction when you speak. Since you are accustomed to hearing your voice with this added low-frequency resonance, the purely air-conducted version on a recording can sound higher-pitched, thinner, or “foreign” to you.
This discrepancy highlights the difference between your internal, multisensory experience of your voice and the external, air-conducted sound that others hear. What you hear on a recording is essentially how everyone else hears you in real-time.