Personally, I’m not a fan of either, so it’s always been a little interesting to me to run into people that are more averse to hearing a recording of their voice.
(Also is there a dedicated term for audio-only voice recordings? 🤨)
People see themselves in the mirror pretty often, so they have a general idea of how they appear to other people. But they don’t hear their own voice regularly unless they record themselves and listen to it, so it’s more of a surprise when they do hear their own voice.
I think this is changing and would change more in thw future. I’m not a fan of voice messages, but my wife and her sisters never “chat” they just send audio messages on whatsapp all the time and, at least my wife, listen to the messages she send multiple times. I don’t think she’s the only one who does that.
I think you have this flipped, though. It’s more like we hear ourselves all the time, but we don’t sound at all to ourselves the way we actually sound. We don’t have a sort of internal picture of ourselves to create dissonance with our reflection or photographs in the same way we do with our voices. It’s that dissonance that makes us distrust or dislike hearing ourselves as we actually sound because that isn’t the voice we identify with internally.
I’d assume it’s because you see yourself whenever you look in a mirror, and that image matches what a picture of you looks like. However when you talk, what you hear doesn’t match what other people hear, so hearing a recording of the ‘external’ sound of your voice sounds more foreign, and that can lead to discomfort.
I suspect it’s because we see accurate representations of ourselves in every mirror. With voice though what we hear normally is distorted by the resonence of our jawbone, so hearing the version everyone else does when it’s played back from a recording is alien and weird.
I suspect this is basically it, however I’ve often thought similar could be said of one’s appearance; as it’s distorted by different lighting, whether your clothing’s gotten wrinkled up a certain way, the wind’s messed up your hair, or you accidentally smudged makeup or some dirt on you somewhere. Although that all is also typically easier to adjust (give or take the lighting and wind) than your voice, so that undoubtedly plays into it.
Might make for an interesting experiment to take picture of someone in a mirror and through the mirror (pinhole or two-way mirror) and then ask people which of the two is real and which is the doctored one. Neither are edited of course but one would look wrong for anyone who met the person in the photos.
Maybe because you hear your voice every time you speak but rarely in recordings so the difference is more jarring. Most people don’t spend all day looking at a mirror but probably see photos of themselves more often than they hear recordings.
Seeing myself on video gives me the same feeling as hearing my voice.
