Recordings of our voice: We can hear with pitiless objectivity all aspects of how we speak, including the unconscious ways we manipulate prosody, pace, and pronunciation to create the voice we wish we had

John Colapinto: This Is the Voice.  Simon & Schuster (January 26, 2021). https://www.amazon.com/This-Voice-John-Colapinto/dp/1982128747/

Indeed, it is a philosophical irony of cosmic proportions that the only voice on earth that we do not know is our own. This is because it reaches us, not solely through the air, but in vibrations that pass through the hard and soft tissues of our head and neck, and which create, in our auditory cortex, a sound completely different to what everyone else hears when we talk. The stark difference is clear the first time we listen to a recording of own voice. (“Is that really what I sound like? Turn it off!”) The distaste with which so many of us greet the sound of our actual voice is not purely a matter of acoustics, I suspect. A recording disembodies the voice, holds it at a distance from us, so that we can hear with pitiless objectivity all aspects of how we speak, including the unconscious ways we manipulate prosody, pace, and pronunciation to create the voice we wish we had. When I mentioned this to a friend, he grimaced at the memory of hearing his recorded voice for the first time. “God!” he cried. “The insincerity!” He was reacting to the mismatch between who he knows himself (privately and inwardly) to be, and the person that he seeks to project into the world.