Does Your Voice Sound Weird in a Recording? THIS is Why!

One of the weirdest things that happens sometimes is when I’m talking on the phone and I get a bit of bounce-back, and hear my own voice echoing for a second.

Does that ever happen to you?

It’s weird hearing your own voice outside of your own head like that. I’m a musician. I have hours upon hours of vocal records, and yet it still throws me for a loop sometimes.

So why exactly does your voice sound so much different when you hear it on tape?

It’s pretty simple, actually. When you hear your voice on a record, the sound is passing through the air and through your speakers or headphones before it reaches your ears. Once it gets to your ears, you hear yourself as everyone else you speak to does.

But when you’re not listening to yourself on a recording, when you’re actually hearing your own voice as you speak, you’re listening to a combination of the sound traveling through the air and the sound vibrating through your head.

The bones in your skull enhance the lower-frequency tones, making your voice sound a lot more full than it really is.

Want to hear how you really sound without using recording equipment? Just cover your left ear and speak! If you think you sound weird when you do, congrats, you’re doing it right.