The voice

When I first landed a job in journalism – writing for sports, this was – I bought one of those handheld digital recorders, thinking I’d be able to quote people more accurately if I could just replay the entire interview and transcribe the interesting bits. I used it for about eight months; it’s now collecting dust in a kind of gadget graveyard, tucked alongside time-weathered oddities like my old cassette player and Virtual Pet keychain. If I were to put on my archaeology hat and retrieve these dubious treasures, I’d be more likely to play with the Virtual Pet than the digital recorder.

 

Because frankly, I’d rather flush an alien’s pixelated poop than hear the sound of my own voice.

 

I hate it. Hate hate hate it. It’s whiny, nasally and high-pitched, a Jay Leno-esque trill that makes nails on a chalkboard sound like Beethoven’s Fifth. I’d sooner let a family of white-breasted warblers build a nest in my ear than willingly listen to myself speak. I’d eat a battery-acid-and-shoe-polish sandwich, or ride across the Sahara on the back of a flatulent sumo wrestler, just to avoid that inauspicious fate.

 

Those piercing tones, that unfettered nerdiness. How can that possibly be me?

 

From the comments I hear, I’m hardly the first person to ask this question. Virtually no one enjoys the sound of their own voice, with the possible exception of pretentious blowhards and syndicated radio hosts (often these are one and the same group). What we hear in our heads when we talk is so far removed from reality that it’s easy to chalk it up to some biological prank, the auditory equivalent of a hip-slimming funhouse mirror. 

 

If I’d known I was destined to sound like a chattering chipmunk, I’d have taken a vow of silence and become one of those robed monks in Tibet, living in quiet meditation and silently washing my underwear in mountain streams.

 

I’m a science guy. Whether pondering my own speech or musing on the unnatural 

consistency of day-old pizza crust, I like to seek scientific explanations for things – mostly out of curiosity, partly because I still harbor the fantasy of cleaning house on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” And lo and behold! Science has an answer for why our recorded voices sound so different than the version we hear in our own minds.

 

There’s good news and bad news.

 

The bad news is that the recorded version of our voices is the reality. Those annoying tones that make us cringe when we watch home movies of wedding toasts in which we drop the F-bomb and insult the bride’s mother – that’s what other people hear when we deign to open our mouths and make noise. Sound, apparently, can reach our ear drums through two different paths, and those paths affect what we perceive. 

 

Let’s say you’re asking your friend for advice on the best place to score a half-pound of Columbian cocaine, right? When you talk, you’re disturbing air molecules around you – that’s sound in a nutshell – and those perturbed molecules enter your friend’s auditory canal, tickle his eardrum, and get processed by the cochlea, a fluid-filled spiral in the inner ear. Voila. He hears your request, and is horrified, because cocaine can cause addiction, poor health, and awful Motley Crue albums. 

 

You hear something different because you’re hearing the synthesis of two different frequencies. You’re getting the tones produced by the jangled air molecules, but those tones harmonize with the sound reaching your cochlea directly through your vibrating head. (I swear, this is totally real.) Your head enhances the deeper, lower-frequency vibrations of your voice. All this information, I should note, comes from a 2009 article in Scientific American, which is now the object of my wrath. Because instead of thinking I sound like George Clooney, like I do in my head, I know my real voice hews a lot closer to Roseanne Barr on a helium bender.

 

Did I say there was good news? I lied. There’s no good news.

 

About a million and a half years ago, sometime between the fall of Troy and the invention of pants, I hosted a college radio show called “Solid Rock.” Maybe this is common to all amateur jockeys, or maybe I’m just a narcissistic boob, but something happened to me when I sat in that booth and bellied up to the mic. I shed all vestiges of shyness and became Radio Guy, your wise-crackin’, glib-tongued guide through the world of screeching guitar solos and lyrics about werewolves. Every two or three songs, I’d do what all the other hosts did: Fill the airwaves with chatter. Blah blah blah, yakety yakety yakety, on and on about bands and classic albums and lineup changes and leather chaps with tassels. At the time, I thought I was pretty good at it – and except for one instance when I conducted an “interview” with my own lame impression of Kermit the Frog, I may well have been. No matter my level of skill, though, I’d be loathe to go back through the old tapes. Memory Lane can be a scenic road, but revisiting those on-air rants with my newfound knowledge of sound vibrations would be cringe-worthy at best, what with my high-pitched, Smurf-with-a-heavy-cold falsetto. Better to confine my ravings to the written word, where I can convince myself I sound like James Earl Jones and nobody’s around who can tell me any differently.

(Note: One of my editors just told me differently. Crap.)

 

It’s too bad, really. I’m sure if I gave the ol’ recorder a good re-charge and snooped around its digital vault, I’d uncover some half-forgotten fragments of time, the kind that would instantly transport me back to what now feels like a long-ago life: Ancient track meets, prehistoric basketball games, and me with my hesitant questioning, a rookie green as grass. Alas, wine glasses would shatter. So would my cognitive dissonance, which allows me to get up and face a day full of interviews and interoffice chatter without burying my head in blushing, ostritch-like shame. 

 

Oh, if only those Tibetan monks had room for one more. Come to think of it, I knew there was a reason why they’re always smiling.