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.

voice dysphoria

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Maybe because you hear your voice every time you speak but rarely in recordings so the difference is more jarring. Most people don’t spend all day looking at a mirror but probably see photos of themselves more often than they hear recordings.

We hear ourselves all the time, but we don’t sound at all to ourselves the way we actually sound. We don’t have a sort of internal picture of ourselves to create dissonance with our reflection or photographs in the same way we do with our voices. It’s that dissonance that makes us distrust or dislike hearing ourselves as we actually sound because that isn’t the voice we identify with internally.

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.

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.

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

Photos don’t convey intelligence, while speech does.

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.

It’s because I sound like a baritone woman. Everybody calls me ma’am on the phone. When I was younger my parents thought I was gay because of my voice. I would prefer to sound like Gilbert Godfrey over this shit voice 😽