In painting, tone is the shade of colour used. Much like in painting our vocal tone is the colour and shades we use in our voice. These vocal colours are used to portray the meaning between the words we say, conveying our emotions, our unspoken intentions and our personalities. Some say you can even tell a person's health from just the tone of their voice. Yet most of us shudder when hearing the sound of our own voice in recordings, whether in singing or speaking. We are present for every word that we say, so why do so many of us dislike our own voices?

To understand this, first, we need to know how the voice works. Sounds are vibrations, or more accurately, how your brain perceives these vibrations. We create our vocal vibrations with our vocal cords in the larynx and they travel up the vocal tract and out into the air. The frequency (how quickly the vibrations move) defines the pitch: the faster the vocal cords vibrate, the higher note you get.

But there’s a little more to it than that. When we hear a pitch, we don’t just hear one note but a whole spectrum of frequencies layered on top of each other, these are called harmonics. The note our brains define as the pitch is the lowest frequency in the spectrum, the fundamental frequency. The rest of the frequencies in the pile, the harmonics, determine the tone. You can see a visual representation of this by using a Spectrogram.

We all have a unique tone because everyone’s body is different. The size and shape of our vocal cords and vocal tract define how strong or weak the harmonics are and this, in turn, defines the tone of our voice. In the same way a flute can play the same note as a trumpet but still sound like a different instrument, different voices can speak and sing at the same pitch but sound entirely different. In my opinion, much like each instrument in an orchestra, every voice has a unique tone that if used in the right way can be beautiful.

But as I said earlier, the sound isn’t just the vibrations we hear, it’s more to do with how the brain perceives these vibrations. Before the brain processes the sound of our voice, it has to go through several filters. When we make a sound, the vibrations leave our mouth and travel through the air, entering the ear canal so that we can hear them. Makes sense, right? But that’s not the whole story…

Your vocal tract is made out of muscle, bone and tissue, all of which conduct sound waves. Some vibrations never escape the vocal tract, they never leave the body. Instead, they travel to your ears from the inside, via bone and tissue conduction. Here is where something interesting happens—filter number one. When sound travels through bone and tissue, and it tends to (although not always) boost the lower frequencies in the voice, the part that makes the voice sound warm, rich and perceived as lower. That is why many of us are surprised by how high, punchy or annoying or voice sounds on recordings.

Want to know what your voice sounds like via bone conduction? Give it a go—cover your ears and speak out loud. This is bone and tissue conduction in action!

When we speak without covering our ears, we hear the sound that leaves the mouth and the sound that travels to our ears via bone and tissue conduction simultaneously. This distortion is why many people are surprised by how different our voice sounds on recordings. Although the sound we hear on recordings can be shockingly different than we imagined, different doesn’t mean ugly. I often ask my singing pupils to record themselves practising so that they can get a more accurate view of the sound they are producing. If we can learn to embrace and critique our recorded voice, it can facilitate a steep learning curve.

These two ways of hearing our voice are both heard by the sound entering our inner ear, one from sound exiting the mouth and entering the ear canal from the outside and the other via filter one, from the inside via bone and tissue conduction. There are more filters going on when we hear these voices though. The second filter is a protective reflex that happens when we hear a loud noise that is also triggered when we speak or sing. This reflex contracts muscles and causes the bones that connect the eardrum to the cochlea to become more rigid. This results in less sound being transmitted - we don’t hear our voice as loudly as it is.

The next filter happens at our cochlea, the part of your inner ear that processes sound. It’s programmed to filter out the sounds it hears most often, so we don’t have to spend the time and energy processing them unless we consciously pay attention to them. You might have noticed this if you live under a flight path. Your voice is one of the sounds you hear the most in your life, so your cochlea automatically filters some of this sound out.

So, your voice is distorted by bone conduction, dampened by a reflex and partially filtered out by the cochlea. It’s no surprise that when listening to a recording, it often doesn’t sound exactly as we expect. There is a final filter though—this filter happens in the brain. Neurologists found out that when you create a sound, your auditory cortex partially shuts down, selectively silencing and amplifying the sounds that are important for us to hear. This allows us to differentiate our voice from another voice and listen for danger whilst preventing sensory overload from the voice. In short, although we are aware we are speaking, we do not necessarily listen to the tone of our voice. We recognise our voice so little that in a 1967 study, only 38% of people were able to identify recordings of their voice within 5 seconds.

After all these barriers to hearing our own voice physiologically, there’s also a psychological element to consider. Many of us have a frequent dialogue with ourselves, our inner voice—the voice of our thoughts. This is the voice we use when rehearsing that big conversation with your boss, the voice that you hear when reading an article, the voice that tells you off when you are late for an appointment or hypes you up when you really need to get a task done. Scientists theorise that our brain is predicting and trying to copy our own voices' sound. But this voice can also be distorted. It’s filtered through our sense of self, our culture, gender and everything we think we are or want to be. Some people can manipulate and change their inner voices at will, and others have a very fixed tone. For some, it’s the clearest voice that they hear. Remember that study where people found it difficult to identify their voice? It’s interesting to note they also found that people with body dysmorphia found it more difficult to identify their voice. The more distorted the image of our self is, the more distorted the image of our voice is. It might be worth considering that perhaps you don’t have a faulty instrument, it might be just how you perceive it.

So, we’ve learned there are many things that distort our idea of our voice. We build our vocal self-image on the distorted way we hear, rather than on reality. But do recordings capture our voice accurately? What is our real sound? Is everyone else hearing your voice in the same way? And do we have the ability to change our tone? I’ll talk about this in future blogs.

But for now, our recorded voice may be a little different than we expected, but by embracing and working with your tone's uniqueness, we can truly learn to master our vocal expression in speaking and singing. We don’t get to choose our instrument but in my experience, the uniqueness of our voice has an eerie way of echoing the uniqueness of our personality. Truly great speakers and singers don’t aim for a different voice but learn to use the instrument they have to great effect. A flute is different from a trumpet but equally beautiful, so maybe we just need to accept our place in the orchestra.