Q: Do I really sound like that?

A: You hear the sound of your voice on the answering machine or voice-mail and you are appalled by what you hear. Do you really sound like that? Well, yes and no. However, I can tell you that you probably sound a lot better than what you hear on these recording devices.

I’ll tell you why:

- People evolved talking to other people, not to machines. Absent the human interface, we tend to lose our natural rhythms and intonations. We aren’t aware of how much the presence of the other person influences how we speak. We find out when we hear a recording.

- The human voice needs a much wider band-pass than electronic devices give it; thus, there is greater complexity and resonance in your voice as it is heard in the air. Telephonic devices pass only what is absolutely necessary for intelligibility.

If you are really interested in finding out how you sound when you talk to people you need to do two things:

1. Record yourself when you are actually having genuine conversations with real people – preferably friends. You want to catch your unguarded and natural speaking style, and

2. Use a decent recording device that can do justice to the richness of your voice.

Give yourself a chance to get to know your voice. Most people turn the machine off so fast that they never get to hear that THEY ARE A LOT BETTER THAN THEY THINK THEY ARE.

On the other hand,… and there’s always the other hand,… you many just find out that:

- you speak just like your parent (and not your favorite one either!)

- that the pitch of your voice is a lot higher than you hoped it was or

- that your accent is a lot stronger than you thought it was.

The foreign born individual will probably not be aware the degree to which his/her accent is a problem for others. This will be news for many people. If this speaker can ‘get by’ and if others do not communicate their frustration, he/she will assume that their speech clarity is O.K. But I have seen these same people hear a recording of their free-flowing conversation. Their eyes get very wide as they are forced to say, “I don’t even understand what I just said!” And this is a fact that astonishes everybody.

“You mean you don’t know how you sound?!” “No. Why should I? I just know what I intend to say!”

That is true for everybody. It can’t be news to you that what we intend is not what is actually heard by the other person:

- she thinks she is being authoritative, he thinks she’s being bitchy

-he thinks he’s being jocular, she thinks he’s being patronizing

- he thinks he’s speaking English, others think he’s speaking Chinese

- she thinks she is explaining, he thinks she is whining

And so it goes. And so what? You may find that your speaking voice is a lot better than you had assumed if you have a properly made recording. At the same time, you can make your speaking voice a lot better than it is, if you’ll use that valuable information on a good recording.

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Audio Interface Pic

Audio Interface Pic

Audio Interface Picture