Why We Hate the Sound of Our Own Voice
It seems as if Adam Driver has been absolutely everywhere lately, particularly since his starring role in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story set the internet alight. This week Driver walked out of an NPR interview after Fresh Air host Terry Gross played a recording of the actor singing “Being Alive” in Marriage Story.
“We don’t really understand why he left,”Fresh Air executive producer Danny Miller said in an email to the Daily Beast. “We were looking forward to the interview—Terry thinks he’s a terrific actor, he was a great guest when he was on [Fresh Air] in 2015—so we were disappointed that we didn’t have a new interview to share with our listeners about Marriage Story.”
Apparently, Gross’s team was made aware of the fact that Driver “prefers not to listen to recordings of himself” and encouraged him to remove his headphones to avoid having to do so.
Driver may have raised some eyebrows by instead choosing to exit the studio, but his reaction is more relatable than you might think. As a journalist who frequently transcribes interviews, I can confirm that the phenomenon of listening to your own voice on tape belongs somewhere in Dante’s fifth or sixth circle of hell. In my case, it’s humiliating to hear myself “like” and “um” my way through what I had thought was a reasonably eloquent conversation; in Driver’s case, I can only imagine the heightened emotion of hearing yourself deliver a pathos-ridden Sondheim song at full volume.
In a 2018 TED Talk, MIT researcher and Ph.D. candidate Rébecca Kleinberger—who studies the ways in which we use and understand our voices and the voices of others—explains that the phenomenon of hating the sound of your own voice on recordings isn’t so unusual.
“Our voice is indistinguishable from how other people see us. It’s a mask that we wear in society,” Kleinberger notes, asking the audience to raise their hands to indicate whether they do not like hearing their own voices recorded. (Most hands, unsurprisingly, went up.)
Kleinberger breaks down her “mask” model, familiarizing her audience with the three voices that most of us possess: the outward voice (which projects character and is the one others hear when we speak), the inward voice (the voice we hear when we speak), and the inner voice (what we hear when we read something silently, think, or dream). According to Kleinberger, because our own voice is one of the sounds we hear most in daily life, we actually perceive it at a lower frequency than we do other sounds, in what is called a habituation effect. In other words, we hear our own voice but we don’t hear it the way people around us do—so it’s jarring when we hear the way it does actually sound to others.
It could be that Driver, like many members of Kleinberger’s audience, simply doesn’t like hearing himself speak. Either way, don’t expect to see him sneaking into a matinee of Marriage Story anytime soon.
Originally Appeared on Vogue
