This topic is one that is discussed more or less every week in sessions. We do an exercise with a singer or work on a song, and the singer’s perception is wildly out of kilter with how it actually sounds.
Sometimes this is because they sang amazingly but the internal sensations seemed unusual. Other times they think they did a great job, and it really didn’t sound as good as they perceived it to be out front.
Why is this?
The voice is a tricky instrument to master, because it’s the only instrument in the world where the musician IS the instrument. The sound actually comes from inside our bodies. We hear not just the final sound out front, but we experience it with all the internal sensations as well.
It’s like being sat inside a piano as it’s being played. We are getting WAY more sound than the listeners. Some frequencies are accentuated more than the final sound, and some are diminished. It can be quite a difference compared to recording yourself and listening back.
Bone Conduction
If you’ve ever been to the dentist and had your teeth descaled/polished, you’ll have heard that unbelievably high frequency buzzing going through your head. Yet if you’ve ever sat beside someone having it done, you don’t hear quite that extended high frequency buzzing that the person in the chair does.
This is bone conduction. This is where the frequencies from your voice are coupled into your bones, your very skull. They are then transmitted to your ears through bone. In contrast, everyone else doesn’t hear those frequencies.
What this results in is an increased sense of low frequencies and high frequencies. This is often in a balance that is not generally representative of what others hear. This can lead people to feeling like they are bassier and/or brighter sounding than they actually are. It takes time to adjust our internal perception to address this.
Resonance
These frequencies don’t just completely disappear though. They cause the body to vibrate. This then generates a range of frequencies and harmonics that are audible, and create a fuller and lusher sound.
So when singers feel they are too bright/too bassy, they often try to restrain those frequencies. They try to dampen what stands out as ‘wrong’ to them (even when it’s right). This in turn also dampens the fullness and vibrancy of our singing to everyone else.
Sadly, in an effort to make ourselves sound good (or ‘as we expect to sound’ inside our head) we end up neutering our final result.
The more we can learn to embrace perhaps sounding a bit off inside our head, while self-monitoring our front, the more we can stop inhibiting quality development in our voices.
Our own aesthetic preferences
It’s not just that we hear one thing and everyone else hears another. It’s that many people have an aesthetic ‘target’ in their head for what any good voice should be, that is either ill-defined, not achievable, or not actually an aesthetically pleasing sound.
As a result, we often try to tailor what we THINK we are hearing to match some aesthetic model we have in our heads… but if that model is not a good one to aim for, we have got real problems. I’ve talked about this in this article right here.
This is why I often say that voice training in sessions is more about ear training than anything else. Sure, the exercises are the tools that move the needle, the song is where we road-test what we are building. But it is that internal model of what good singing actually sounds like is the yard-stick by which we measure our progress and set our compass by. Without a clear and accurate model, we can and will drift off-course.
Conclusion
It is 100% normal to hear one thing inside your head, and then be surprised by what you hear when you listen back. It takes years of voice training and regularly recording yourself to slowly align what you THINK you are hearing with what the resultant sound actually is.
If this is something you feel you are battling with, and would like to start to enjoy your voice inside your own head as well as out, I’d love to start work with you. You can book in via my booking form right here.