Gutturals

My parents bought me a portable video camera when I was junior-high school. For years, I honed my skills recording and editing film. I “starred” in whatever film I was working on with some friends, but something I never got used to was hearing my voice on screen.

It sounded nothing like how I perceived it. When I heard it on camera, it sounded muffled, guttural, unintelligible, pathetic. I was acutely aware of this in high school when I began recording and editing my own music.

When my mind was in editing mode, I felt distant from my singing. I didn’t identify with the voice as much. My purpose was to focus on frequencies, effect magnitude, timing, reverb, and harmony. But then when I took a step back and listening to “my music”, I felt embarrassed. Who was that singing? Poor soul.

Although I drifted out of recording media after high school, I held on to this impression for years. I found it easy to talk to people, make friends, and present to audiences of different makeups. Yet I tended to wonder what these people saw in me. Did they agree with my assessment of my voice and find it comforting to have me around to make them feel better by comparison?

In my first relationship, English was not my partner’s first language, so I didn’t think too much about it.

And then I perceived a change. I taught an internal class at my workplace late in 2017, but unlike the classes I usually taught, our team wanted this class to be recorded so that employees in remote offices could watch it as well. And so I did.

The recording files of the class were quite large on my computer, so I converted them to a smaller, more compressed format. To verify that it was successful, I listened to the recording. Wow. I could understand what I was saying! There were hints of that mumbling buffoon that I had observed before, but wow, I was more than half-decent at communicating.

Around the same time, I started listening to a podcast voiced by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of Linked In. I noticed in Reid’s voice some of the same qualities that I identified in my own voice and I really enjoyed his podcast.

I taught another internal class at my workplace this week. Again, I went through the process of reducing the file size of the recording, but after listening to it, I finally understood: My voice is not so hard to listen to. I’m unsure whether it’s due to improved pronunciation or an internal change in perspective or a new appreciation developed from listening to Reid Hoffman or a mix.

This reminds me of confirmation bias, a human tendency to only retain information that supports an existing hypothesis. For years, I discarded evidence around me that people found my voice acceptable and reinforced my assumptions everytime I failed to communicate with someone.

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