Hearing your own voice

[Guest sleeping chrysalid]

You know how when you hear yourself speak on a recording it never sounds the way you think it sounds?

Has anyone ever noticed that the voice you hear when you speak is always more feminine than the voice other people hear?

Is it your head voice getting in the way? Do you feel so feminine that you always picture yourself sounding female when you speak?

I don't know but I was annoyed to hear myself on a recording device. It was a wake-up call.

Now where do I get my own voice recorder?

[Guest Talon]

Hey there,

Totally know what you're saying. I get annoyed with my voice too when I hear it on recordings. I always loathed my own voice.

But - recording yourself is excellent voice training It really helps you pinpoint all those little things you wanna change.

Glad I'm not the only one who thinks it's so weird to hear yourself on a recording

Cheers,

Talon.

[Guest Ney'ite]

I am not fond of my voice at all, and I think it sounds odd. But for the past 11 months I only get Ma'am-ed on the phone.

A suggestion I have come across in order to get an idea of your voice, is to grab a large frying pan (fight the urge to swat someone annoying you), and talk into it. The echo back will give you an idea of what your voice sounds like once it leaves your palate and comes back.

Recorders can be good, but I think they have there limitations and do not always represent what you really sound like to others. If you have a cell phone, you could use that to record your voice and play it back. Or even e-mail that recording to yourself and then listen to it on your computer.

[Guest Lizzie McTrucker]

I found an app for smartphones, I think it's called Tap-a-talk or something like that. It's for recording voice memos so it's perfect for recording yourself talking and then you can play it back and listen.

[Guest BeatriceT]

You need to have a good microphone or else it won't replicate the same sound (same with listening devices).

[Guest JenMorse]

Almost all phones have a built in voice recording system. Personally, I use my iphone.

[Guest sleeping chrysalid]

I don't know what just happened but apparently my voice varies from time to time. I know that when I am extremely tired I talk more slowly, deeply, and quietly just because I don't have the energy to speak.

Apparently, while I sounded masculine on the recording, I sounded like my mother to my bus driver.

I am in co-op for my final semester of high school so I only go into school every so often and my bus driver phoned to ask if I would be picked up tomorrow.

He referred to me in the third person as if he was talking to one of my parents and I asked him who he thought he was speaking to.

After he realized it was me he said it directly. He admitted the reason. He actually said it. "You have a female voice".

Not all the time. My voice was male on tape but now I know how much it varies. The recording I listened to isn't how I always sound.

[Guest Zeda]

Hmm, I just realised I have a cell phone and a landline with an answering machine >.> I am going to type up a paragraph or so to read and see what I sound like that way.

I remember hearing my voice once in a recording and I was told that the recording sounds quite bad (I have multiple tones in my voice that don't get picked up by recorders, apparently). I guess this is a good thing because I was mortified at how I sound.

[Guest HeatherAnne]

I find that getting to my femme voice from standstill is very hard. But it is much easier now that I have recordings of a few successes. I can play those back and immediately the voice clicks in again for me.

[Guest Mia J]

One of the main reasons we don't like what we hear from a recording is because when we speak, much of what we hear in our head is from the bone conduction going to our eardrums and not just the sound waves going through the air. What you hear when you record your voice is usually closer to what others hear.

Even though it does not "sound" right to us, it is essential to use a recording device when developing your new voice. Remember you are not only trying to change the pitch of your voice you need to develop being able pick up the speech patterns of a woman compared to a man.

Men talk with a monotone and women speak with a lot of resonance and variations on their pitch and tone.

Women also enunciate more than men.

Recording your voice can really help you with seeing how you are doing with this.

One of the things to do is to listen to recordings of a CIS woman speaking and then try to record the same thing seeing if you can emulate what the CIS woman was saying.

Mia

[Guest Sebb]

I had a friend who was really into choir tell me that a person's voice is much deeper in their own head than it actually is. I don't know if that's actually true, but I think that there's definitely some factual base in the fact that the voice you hear is different than the voice others hear.

It kind of sucks for me. I feel like my voice is at least slightly deep, but I hear it after a recording and it's a lot more feminine than I expect.