Why does my voice sound different on recordings than it does in my head?

If you don’t like the way your recorded voice sounds, you are not alone. In fact, I’ve never met anyone who loves how their recorded voice sounds. I have known many people, including award-winning singers, who downright hate to listen to recordings of themselves.

It’s hard to believe that someone wouldn’t want to listen to their celebrated voice when other people happily pay money to hear it. But when many people hear the disconnect between the sounds they think they are making and the sounds the world hears, they feel sad! They identify with the sounds they think they are making. They like to think they are coming across a certain way. And then recordings tell the harsh truth. Ouch.

NEWS FLASH: The way you sound to yourself will almost always sound different than in the recordings!

When you perceive sounds someone else is making, the sound is traveling through the air in waves into your ears, where the waves vibrate your eardrums. But when you perceive the sounds that you are making, your eardrums vibrate in response to two sources of sound. The first source is from the usual sound waves flowing through the air into your eardrums, while the second source is from the vibrations of your skull. Your skull vibrates sympathetically with the sound you are making in your throat. Bones vibrate differently from air, so the sound changes - it gains more low frequencies, and then that version of the sound also contributes to the vibrations of your eardrums. So the sound you hear is generally darker and richer, with a greater mix of lower and higher frequencies, and the sound everyone else hears you making is generally brighter, with more of the higher frequencies amplified.

Get over the discrepancy: Recording yourself

The best way to calibrate your singing voice in your head to what you sound like to others is to record yourself during practice. I find it’s really valuable to use a recording device in my practice so I can make adjustments to suit my taste. I know anything I hear in my head while I sing will be misleading for the reasons I mentioned.

For instance, I’ll sing a line or two of my song into the Voice Memos app and then listen back to check my work. Then I’ll try the same snippet again and again with adjustments. I’ll try different registers, different emphases, different riffs. Sometimes I’ll even discover I’m having pitch issues via my recordings that I wasn’t aware of.

I’ve recorded my singing so much at this point that the sound of my recorded voice doesn’t bother me at all. Of course, it’s nothing compared to the amazing things I hear in my head *wink, wink* but I’m pretty sure that’s how everyone feels. Keep recording yourself during practices and you will get over the discrepancy in no time!