People see themselves in the mirror pretty often, so they have a general idea of how they appear to other people. But they don’t hear their own voice regularly unless they record themselves and listen to it, so it’s more of a surprise when they do hear their own voice.

You get used to seeing yourself in a mirror.

Most people don’t listen to their voice nearly as often as they look in a mirror.

I suspect it’s because we see accurate representations of ourselves in every mirror. With voice though what we hear normally is distorted by the resonence of our jawbone, so hearing the version everyone else does when it’s played back from a recording is alien and weird.

It’s easier to change your hairstyle or makeup than it is your voice. Most people also hear their voice about an octave lower in their head. It resonates differently internally than it does out in the air. A recording of your voice is like looking in a mirror and seeing something different than what you see most of the time.

I think there’s another aspect that people haven’t really pointed out yet: that most speakers and microphones are trash. With cameras and screens, we’ve gotten really good at capturing real life in pictures and then displaying those pictures. But microphones and speakers are fundamentally limited by physics. And most microphones and speakers that everyday people would have access to are limited by physics to be awful at picking up sounds accurately.

Try listening to the same song on a desktop speaker vs. earphones. Earphones just simply don’t reproduce the song to the same quality as the desktop speakers. They are terrible at reproducing low tones, and the balance is usually wack. Or, for instance, try talking to a friend via a Zoom call vs. talking in person. You can pretty easily tell the difference. You can get expensive equipment to capture and reproduce sounds more accurately, which is what streamers and youtubers tend to do, but then that’s very expensive and not really something that ordinary people would be willing to invest in.

That’s not to say that the other responses are wrong and that the resonance of the jawbone doesn’t affect how we perceive our own voices (they’re correct, and the resonance does affect our own perception), but simply saying that it’s just the resonance is missing out on the crucial detail that our voice recordings are fundamentally trash to begin with.

As an analogy, you can try taking a selfie using an old laptop’s front-facing camera. You probably won’t like how you look either - you’d look either sickly pale or drunken red, eyebags appear out of nowhere, the distortion of the lens makes you look fat. All of these qualities aren’t because you are any of these things in real life. It’s simply that laptop cameras are bad. Same is true for microphones and speakers.

Your voice sounds different because you hear your own voice through your skull which adds bass. Recorded voices sound higher pitched.

I’d guess lack of familiarity. Your voice sounds different than what you hear in your head so a recording can seem very strange, whereas seeing a picture or reflection is much more frequent for many people.

The way your voice sounds inside your head is impacted by the way that your voice vibrates and reverberates inside your skull, producing a deeper and more resonant sound. Everyone tends to think recordings of their voice sound tinny because it is not in the same deep register they are used to.

Similarly, people tend to only be used to seeing their likeness in the mirror, meaning that other images of them which are not mirrored can seem as unfamiliar as a whole other person.

Seeing myself on video gives me the same feeling as hearing my voice.

On a side note, imagine being the first person to ever hear a recording of their own voice. Would they have known that how we hear ourselves isn’t what others hear, or would they chalk it up to a flaw in the nascent technology?

Your voice resonates through your bones and sounds very different to you personally. So when you hear a recording it is a different voice than you’re used to hearing.

A photo is a photo, you know what you look like. Some people just don’t like having photos taken. The way some people don’t really look in the mirror that much.

Photos don’t convey intelligence, while speech does.

voice dysphoria

I have central auditory processing disorder, capd. Seeing a visual is instantaneous, clear, easy. People speaking is torturous, brain can’t process, requires lot of work, confusion, translating. For me, visuals are external, but even external sounds become internal, physical. Activation of the limbic system, anxiety, fear, can lead to hearing voices. Prefrontal cortex, I think, is where brain stops internalizing sound as stress, fear. Why some people with adhd who hear voices take a small, mild dose of Ritalin at night. Ritalin means less limbic, less fear.

Not an answer to your question, but I think different areas of the brain process sound, visuals. Different mechanisms. I’d be interested to know if someone could shed light on this.

I’d assume it’s because you see yourself whenever you look in a mirror, and that image matches what a picture of you looks like. However when you talk, what you hear doesn’t match what other people hear, so hearing a recording of the ‘external’ sound of your voice sounds more foreign, and that can lead to discomfort.