The Sound of My Own Voice

My brothers and I used to borrow my mom's tape recorder to create mock radio shows. We had sports reports and interviews and commercials. I liked creating advertising jingles based on songs I already knew. I had a version of "New York, New York," in which the singer was spreading peanut butter instead of news, and a public service ad in which Henry sang about a hole in the ozone rather than in his bucket, and Liza chimed in with suggestions about reducing the use of aerosol cans.

I don't know what happened to these tapes. They would be awfully fun to listen to now, but they were probably recorded over, broken, lost, or thrown away long ago. It's a fun childhood memory, though. I liked the creativity involved in making the radio shows. What I hated, however, was the sound of my own voice. When I listened to my voice on tape, it sounded higher-pitched than the voice that echoed around in the acoustics of my own skull, and I thought my voice sounded like I had a stuffy nose, with my m's and n's leaning towards b's and d's.

We don't get public views of ourselves very often because we're stuck in our own bodies. We see the mirror image, and our camera smiles. I spent a lot of my young life feeling uncomfortable with the me that other people saw, but as I've grown older, I've also grown much more comfortable in my own skin. For example, I remember hating the dimple in my chin, with a passion, and now such passionate hatred seems silly to me. The dimple is just one of my many defining characteristics. Most of the time I forget that I even have a dimple in my chin, and I'll bet there are some of you who have never noticed it.

There are definitely parts of me that I still wish were different, but I've also really come to terms with myself. I can see awkward candid pictures of myself and feel okay with it because that's how other people always see me and they're okay with it. I have learned that when people look at me, they just see me. And that they think about it a lot less than I do.

This in turn helps me think about it less. But I have typically found it hard to do the same with my speech. It's not just my voice (which as an adult is still higher-pitched and stuffy-nosier than I hear it in my own head). A few years ago I was part of a research project that involved analyzing video of videos of a group of teachers that met about once a month. I started to get to know their verbal tics really well. One of them said "you know" about once every five words, and another talked really fast and tumbled over his own words so much that he was barely coherent in writing (though perfectly easy to understand in real life).

I wouldn't have noticed any of these things if I didn't have to spend so much time looking at the written version of their words, but seeing these verbal tics made me self-conscious of my own. My mind and my mouth don't always communicate at the same rate, and so I stutter or say "like" too much or get my words jumbled because my mind sees several possible ways I could describe something and instead of settling on one decides just to send them all out simultaneously. Most of the time I think it's just best that I don't know what I sound like to other people.

However.

I have learned a lot from doing my dissertation, about my topic, about doing research, about patience, about myself. But one of the funny little side consequences of my dissertation work has been that I have finally learned to confront and be (almost) perfectly okay with my own voice. My first task after my pre-oral defense meeting on Tuesday was to listen to my recording of the meeting so that I could write up the changes my committee wants to see before I defend in early July. I put off doing it for a little while, partly because I didn't really want to hear how I'd actually sounded in the meeting. So when I finally pressed play and began listening I was surprised to find that I wasn't embarrassed by the me I was hearing. It just sounded like me. I didn't sound incoherent or stuffy-nosed or stuttering. Yes, I noticed that I speak kind of fast, and that I say "um" a little more than I should, but I didn't feel self-conscious about it.

My dissertation research involved conducting lots of interviews, and then listening and re-listening to all of those interviews as I transcribed them. I heard my voice over and over and over again. Sometimes I would cringe, sometimes I had to re-experience conversational awkwardness. But I also spent a lot of time listening to how other people talk and recording their own speech dysfluencies and wading around in the messiness that is spoken language, and this time (unlike that other research project) my own speech was part of that messiness. Somewhere along the way I started to hear my own voice the way I once learned to see the way I look to other people. When I look at someone, even from funny angles, I just see that person. When I hear someone, I just hear that person. And when someone looks at me or hears me, they just see and hear me.