Have you ever noticed that your own voice when you speak and your voice on recorded sound completely different to you? But when you ask a friend, they say it sounds just the same both times!
Such a phenomenon happens because when you speak you hear your own voice in two different ways due to the ability of our bones to conduct sound.
The first is through vibrating sound waves in the air hitting your ear drum, the way other people hear your voice. The second way is through vibrations inside your skull set off by your vocal chords. Those vibrations travel up through your bony skull and again set the ear drum vibrating. However, as they travel through the bone they spread out and lower in pitch, giving you a false sense of bass. The way we hear our voices is a combination of the regular sounds and the low-frequency sounds conducted by the bones of our skulls. Then when you hear a recording of your voice, it sounds distinctly higher.
While you recorded voice only through the air, similar to all other sounds in nature, the voice you hear when you speak is the combination of sound carried along both paths. When you listen to a recording of yourself speaking, the bone-conducted pathway that you consider part of your “normal” voice is eliminated, and you hear only the air-conducted component in unfamiliar isolation. You can experience the reverse effect by putting in earplugs so you hear only bone-conducted vibrations.
Some people have abnormalities of the inner ear that enhance their sensitivity to this component so much that the sound of their own breathing becomes overwhelming, and they may even hear their eyeballs moving in their sockets.
