Hearing our voice on tape
 

The first time I heard my voice recorded on tape...I swore that couldn't really be what I sounded like to others.

But yes, it was.
A few years later in a drama class, the teacher ruthlessly critiqued our speaking voices. Mine was a garbled mess of swallowed vowels & mostly incoherent.

I hid for another ten years before doing something about it.
To this day I have to consciously make the effort to sit up straight & speak from the diaphragm.

Let's tell our stories about hearing ourselves.

It bothers me to hear my voice on tape. I keep thinking that there is no way I sound like that, but I accept that my voice must sound like that.

Your advice to speak from the diaphram is good. I do that all the time when I give presentations.

I sound like a 12-year-old boy on tape.

Just for the record, I'm not a 12-year-old boy. I just don't INFLECT THINGS LIKE A WOMAN SHOULD and I hate it and I want to die.

Who likes their voice on tape, though? I'd like to hear from someone who thinks they sound like a magical rainbow fairy and/or James Bond on tape. And then I want them to sing a Backstreet Boys song to us.

I sound like a young girl on tape or over a phone. I loath calling any kind of tech support or what not because they always say 'ma'am' to me. I'm 31, and very much a man.

edit: I've even tried making my voice deeper while on the phone, to no avail. Which is funny because I can get my voice to go pretty deep. Not Berry White deep, but a lot deeper then my normal speaking voice.

Who the hell calls anyone "mama" over the phone, anyway? Did I miss the part where tech support was taken over by sassy black women?

Due to my hearing loss, what I hear and what comes out is different from the get go. My voice seems to come across as slightly monotone when i listen to myself on a voice mail message, for example.


I don't know honestly whether I dislike my own voice, but since I do a lot of speaking to groups as part of my job, I hope that my voice fluctuations can be picked up and help make my talks more listenable.

Fat fingered it... sorry.

I used not to like hearing my own voice but then I got over it thanks to a telephone job in which everyone had to listen to their own calls - so I got used to it. My accent is a little stronger than I think it is when speaking and my nose sounds sort of blocked but it's clear enough. Surely what we sound like on tape is what others are used to, and if they somehow heard what it sounds like in our heads, then that would be as odd as when we hear our own voice externally (i.e. on tape).

Hearing myself on tape used to give me the creeps...nowadays it only gives me the willies.

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