Saturday, October 8, 2016

                                                     Your voice

Human beings are complex beings, we cannot see ourselves in real , we even cannot know how we sound to others. What we think as our voice  is distorted and not the original version. This blog post is a humble attempt to dig deeper in this subject, Distortion of sound.

We all had this thought where we wanted to know how our voice sounds to others and for this we recorded our voice via mic but the output that we got was weird . We felt bad for our flat tone, without emotions but that couldn't be helped. The situation got worse when we recorded a song on a mobile or a laptop.  

Although it sounds awkward but there is nothing wrong with your throat and its a common phenomenon. So the version of voice you hear is different to what others hear you  and what you hear yourself once recorded.

There are different reasons why it happens, it is both personal/biological and technological. Personal as in how your voice makes its way from mouth to ear and technological when you record your voice.

We will further look what these factors are

Personal
Even if you find your voice sexy, it may not be so to the person you are talking to.This is because when we speak we hear our voice in two different ways

The first is through vibrating sound waves hitting our ear drum, the way other people hear our voice. The second way is through vibrations inside our skull set off by our vocal chords. Those vibrations travel up through our bony skull and again set the ear drum vibrating. However as they travel through the bone they spread out and lower in pitch, giving a false sense of bass. Then when we hear a recording of our voice, it sounds distinctly higher.

Technological
Different type of microphones are available in market starting from the one in your headset, mobile device to one present in recording studio. Each one has its own features and competence to record. Further once your voice is recorded, different compression to make it digitised in any of audio formats like mp3, wav further distorts the sound. So the recording you heard had made its way through different modulations.
Now while professional mics minimise all distortions(popping and sibilance) and noise, a basic microphone fails to do any of these. 

How to better record your voice
The irony of life is, you can never know the truth, or see and listen yourself without distortions and we have to live with it. However we can always lessen it by using different software, better mics and recording place with zero background noise.

However if you are too lazy to do it all,  you can try this method 

The man in the picture is Chris Beatty. He is demonstrating how you can get a rough idea of how you sound to others. For this ,place two cardboards next to your ear  like this   Image result for how to hear my actual voice
and try talking to yourself. Now you may look weird but you only chose this option. Placing cardboard next to your ear deflects the sound from its origin and you hear it how it reverberates in the room . This is partly a successful way to hear how your voice sounds like. Link to the video is given below


Other than this you can research about good microphones available in the market and other tips to sound better.


Cheers.

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