I Hate the Sound of My Voice

I ran a mini poll on Twitter (http://twitter.polldaddy.com/) asking about people’s biggest worries when conducting interviews. Some replies were taken from the interviewee’s perspective, which I will talk about at a later date, but some concerns applied to you as the interviewer or both.

Let’s address them one by one:

1. My voice sounds awful

We all cringe when we hear our own voices, but you have to realise that the way you hear your voice is different to the way others hear it. That’s the reason we are usually shocked when we hear a recording of our voice because it isn’t the way you hear it when you speak.

I just took a phone call from a radio producer and I think my voice is sounding dreadful today. I’m having a few throat problems and I joked about it. He said, “Really? I thought you were sounding quite sexy.”

We are all critical of how we sound but most people have perfectly pleasant voices. If you are aware that your voice is heavily accented then you might want to practice slowing down your speech and making yourself clearer (i.e. no mumbling or slang terms) but the listener’s ear adapts quickly to an accent and will tune-in to what you are saying in a matter of minutes.

Other voices that can be hard on the ear are high-pitched, whiney and/or nasally voices (think of Janice from the Friends’ series). Again, if you truly feel you fit into this category (you probably don’t and are being too hard on yourself) then you can work on your voice to make it more acceptable to the listener.

You need to bear in mind that when you are speaking in an interview or on a podcast people are less concerned with what you sound like than they are with what you have to say (and if you are the interviewer your speech contribution should be significantly less than the interviewee). I recently listened to an interview featuring a woman with a very whiney voice and wondered whether I would be able to listen for long (as you can imagine, I can be ultra-critical on voices at times) but the subject was so fascinating and valuable that I soon realised I had been listening for an hour and the voice had only bothered me for the first few minutes.

Don’t let the sound of your voice put you off creating your own audio products. The more you record your voice the easier it will become. You will probably always remain critical of the way you sound, but you can channel that criticism into something positive in order to improve over time.

Technorati Tags: product creation, recorded voice