Question: When I sing and then hear a recording of my voice, I hate it but everyone else tells me that I’m an excellent singer. Why is this?
Monday, August 4th, 2008Answer: Hi Jameson,
Good question! There are good reasons for what you feel. As a voice teacher who often records the lessons of his students, I run into the same thing frequently with my students.
As singers, we hear but a fraction of the sound we produce coming to us from the “outside.” Sound from our larynx (voice box) travels instantly through our Eustachian tubes directly to our ears (inside us), plus the vibrations and sounds travel through both bone structure and muscle tissue to our ears. So, much of the sound we hear from ourselves comes to our perception from the INSIDE. Therefore, a significantly smaller fraction of the whole is what we hear “bouncing off the walls of the room” in which we’re singing and comes to us from the outside.
Here’s the clincher that we as singers have to reckon with: we don’t hear ourselves the way everyone else hears us! Guess how everyone else hears us? … They hear us the same way a good recording of ourselves reveals. The kicker is that since we never (or rarely) get exposed to how we sound to the world, when we hear ourselves recorded, our very frequent response is: “Oh no! That’s not me is it!?”
Part of our struggle is that over the years, all we know about our own sound is what we ourselves hear while singing. This means that when we strive to make “beautiful and expressive” sound, we’ve arrived at our aesthetic judgments based almost entirely on what we hear of ourselves as we sing and that is our impression – which is NOT how others hear us.
In the process of studying voice, student singers quite literally have to relearn how they listen – and re-educate themselves as to what “good sound” is – because on first exposure they often think of it as “ugly” “harsh” “edgy” etc. You may not be studying voice, but you’ve experienced what many voice students experience when they hear themselves recorded.
If others like what they hear when you sing – you have a lot going for you – but your ears may still need to be “educated” as to the “real” sound coming out.
I hope this has been helpful. Best wishes.