Two reasons:
- The tape recorder is not perfect. It may not be reproducing your voice very
well; some recording devices, for example, will overemphasize high frequencies
or low frequencies, or even cut out a certain range of sound altogether.
However, these days most tape recorders are quite good.
- When you hear your own voice, it's not being transmitted to your ear in the
same way as it is to someone else's ear.
When you hear someone else speaking, the sound--after being shaped by the
resonating cavities in the person's head--travels through the air to your ear,
where it is collected and focused onto your eardrum. The eardrum vibrates,
vibrations are transferred to the middle ear, and from there to the innner ear
where they are converted into electrical signals that travel to your brain.
But when you hear yourself speak, most of the sound does not pass through your
eardrum and may not even pass through your middle ear. Instead, the sound is
conducted through your skull bones and reaches the ear by direct transfer to
either the middle or the inner ear.
Furthermore, the sound you hear from your own voice is not shaped by the
cavities in your head because it is transmitted directly by the bones of the
head and never passes through the air in those cavities.
I am a trained singer and have found, through years of voice lessons, that what
I feel in my head is far more important than what I hear myself singing (as long
as the pitch is OK). If you think about it, you can feel the sinuses vibrating
as you speak or sing.
Hope this helps.
| Dan Berger |
| MadSci Administrator |
|