People say “I don’t like my voice, it sounds horrible on a recording!” I am often asked if listening to recordings helps you work on your voice. Well, yes and no. Mostly no.
- Be careful of the quality of the recording you are listening to. It may not sound like the Real You in the first place.
- The voice you hear on the recording is one you will never experience — when you work/rehearse or perform. You hear your voice in a way that no one else will ever — from the inside of your body. Therefore, to take that recording as some where to start from, as a voice professional you will never really be starting from there. You will never hear your voice like that. So to a degree, that recording is false information.
- We all have the resident critic who tells us we’re no good. It’s not helpful to give it more fodder for criticism. I’m wary of listening or watching tapes for fear that my ability to respond to a story will hit a wall of self-consciousness. ‘You can’t to that, that looks/sounds ______________ (fill in words of deprecation).’
- What recordings can do is provide a record of a specific telling so that you can remember how you told the story that time. They can give you feedback on how a particular vocal experiment is working, as long as you can keep a level head about how you perceive quality of your voice.
- The best feedback on your voice comes from listeners you trust and, most importantly, from your own physical experiences.
I would love to hear comments on this!
Thinking of it as ‘Different’ not ‘Wrong’… To add to your comments 2 and 3, we usually feel that our own voice sounds ‘wrong’ on recordings, but actually it just sounds different, as you explain. When we start from a point of disliking the recording because it sounds wrong, we’ll never make it ‘right’. It’s easier to get an unbiased opinion from someone who doesn’t feel the recording sounds wrong, because they always hear us as we are!