【龙腾网】华盛顿大学：在录音中听到自己的声音为什么会让我们感到不适？

正文翻译

Your voice, when played back to you, can sound unrecognizable.

（图解：你的嗓音如果被播放了出来，那可能会无法辨认）
（2021年5月17日发表，作者为华盛顿大学医学部耳鼻喉科助理教授尼尔·巴特）

As a surgeon who specializes in treating patients with voice problems, I routinely record my patients speaking. For me, these recordings are incredibly valuable. They allow me to track slight changes in their voices from visit to visit, and it helps confirm whether surgery or voice therapy led to improvements.

作为一名专治存在嗓音问题病人的外科医生，我经常会录下我病人的说话声。对我来说，这些录音有着极高的价值。通过它们，我就能追踪病人每次来就诊时嗓音出现的微妙变化，这有助于确认为了改善病情应当采用手术还是嗓音治疗。

Yet I’m surprised by how difficult these sessions can be for my patients. Many become visibly uncomfortable upon hearing their voice played back to them.

然而，让我惊讶的是：这些治疗过程对我的病人来说，可能会非常难熬。很多人听到自己的声音被回放出来，脸色就不对了，明显感到很不舒服。

“Do I really sound like that?” they wonder, wincing.

他们会疑窦丛生，畏畏缩缩地问，“我的声音听起来真是这样的吗？”

(Yes, you do.)

（是的，正是如此）

Some become so unsettled they refuse outright to listen to the recording – much less go over the subtle changes I want to highlight.

有些病人会陷入极度不安，会断然拒绝去听这些录音，更不用说去检视我重点关注的微妙变化了。

The discomfort we have over hearing our voices in audio recordings is probably due to a mix of physiology and psychology.

我们在录音中听到自己的声音时会出现的不适感，可能兼有生理学和心理学方面的原因。

When listening to a recording of your voice, the sound travels through the air and into your ears – what’s referred to as “air conduction.” The sound energy vibrates the ear drum and small ear bones. These bones then transmit the sound vibrations to the cochlea, which stimulates nerve axons that send the auditory signal to the brain.

当你在录音中听到你的声音时，这种声音是经由空气入你的耳的，这被称为“空气传导”。声能会让鼓膜和听小骨振动。之后，这些骨头会把声音振动传导到耳蜗，进而刺激神经轴突，后者会将听觉信号传给大脑。

For this reason, people generally perceive their voice as deeper and richer when they speak. The recorded voice, in comparison, can sound thinner and higher pitched, which many find cringeworthy.

由于这个原因，人们在感觉上会觉得自己说话时的声音更深沉、也更丰富。相比之下，录音中的声音听起来可能会更单薄、更尖锐，有很多人会为此而生厌。

There’s a second reason hearing a recording of your voice can be so disconcerting. It really is a new voice – one that exposes a difference between your self-perception and reality. Because your voice is unique and an important component of self-identity, this mismatch can be jarring. Suddenly you realize other people have been hearing something else all along.

还有一个原因是，听到录音中自己的声音可能会让人感到非常不安。这的确是一个新的声音，它也暴露出了你的自我认知和现实间的差异。因为你的声音是独一无二的，而且是自我身份认同的重要组成部分，这种不匹配可能会让人不快。突然之间你意识到，旁人一直以来听到的都是别的东西。

Even though we may actually sound more like our recorded voice to others, I think the reason so many of us squirm upon hearing it is not that the recorded voice is necessarily worse than our perceived voice. Instead, we’re simply more used to hearing ourselves sound a certain way.

尽管在别人听来，我们的嗓音可能更像录音里的声音，但我认为，我们中间有如此多的人在听到后会感到不舒服，并不是因为录下的声音一定比我们自己感知到的嗓音低劣，相反，我们只是更习惯自己的嗓音听来自带一种特定的观感。

评论翻译

I haven’t been able to find a camera that is capable of taking a good photo of me yet and I’ve purchaesd dozens. All junk.

（回复）我至今都找不到能把我拍得很美的相机，而我已经买了几十部了。全都是垃圾。

Mirrors are the same - I haven’t looked on one in my entire lifetime that shows hoe wonderful I am = they all seem to show me as rather dull and lately somehow ageing

（回复）镜子也是一样，我这辈子就没有碰到过能映现出我倾城美貌的镜子，似乎它们映照出的全都是我那了无生趣的脸，最近照出来的我不知为什么还变老了。

Andrew Shead
Own-voice dissonance abates as one becomes accustomed to hearing it via air conduction.

当一个人慢慢习惯了从空气传导中听到自己的声音，那种不和谐感就会减弱了。

Paul A Whitelaw
Yes, in my mind I sound like Richard Burton on the boards, but in reality i sound like Hugh Grant on helium.

是的，在我的脑海里，我的嗓音就像舞台上的理查德·伯顿，可现实是，我的嗓音听起来就像是吸了氦气的休·格兰特。
（译注：理查德·伯顿（1925-1984）为六十年代好莱坞身价最高的明星；休·格兰特（19760-），英国演员）

Dean Frenkel
Thanks for this most interesting article. I think there are other reasons not mentioned here. There are features of our voice that are not audible in our internal voice that become apparent in our external voice that are magnified, and if the technology is poor it caricatures the voice akin to a distorted mirror.

感谢你写出这篇极为有趣的文章。我觉得还有一些原因是文中没有提及的。我们嗓音中的一部分特征在经由体内传导的声音中是听不见的，但在经由外部传导的声音中就会被放大，从而变得很明显，而如果技术不好，就会把这种声音搞得很滑稽，如同哈哈镜中的自己。

Mark Stevenson
To what extent is the sound of our air-conducted voice determined by our physiology, and to what extent is it learned through a process of adjustment and socialization?

（香港中文大学人类学系兼职副教授）我们由空气传导的声音在多大程度上是由我们的生理机能决定的，又在多大程度上是在自我调节和社会化进程中习得的？

As we grow up, acquire language, and hear a range of voices, presumably we adjust to the air-conducted voices we hear, as well as to other people’s reactions to our own sound.

随着我们长大，习得了语言，听到了一系列的声音，想必我们会去适应我们所听到的经由空气传导的声音，也会去适应其他人对我们自己声音的各种反应。

Are we simply voicing in the dark, so to speak?

难道我们只是在浑然无察中发声吗，可以这么说吗？

Shane Harvey
In my head I sound like Darth Vader but when I play my voice back from an audio recording Im Sid Sloth.

在我的脑海中，我的声音像达斯·维达（《星球大战》），但在录音里回放我的声音时，我听起来却像树懒希德（《冰河世纪》）。

Paul Jelley
I’m surprised no-one has mentioned singing. I used to be told I had a good singing voice and should ‘keep it up’. Listening to a recording of my singing made me wince, I haven’t sung in public since.

让我感到意外的是，都没有人提到唱歌。以前有人告诉我说我有一幅好歌喉，应该“保持下去”。可是听完我唱歌的录音，我就畏缩了，自那以后我再也没有在公众场合唱过歌。

It still upsets me, and I am now entering late middle-age. Still can’t accept it. If you think about it, through most of human history, before recording devices, people made the mistake of thinking other people heard them the way they heard themselves. And they were better off for it.

这个情况至今都很让我心烦，而我现在正在进入中年后期。可还是无法接受。你可以想一想，在人类历史中的大部分时间里，在出现录音设备之前，人们犯了一个错误，认为别人耳中自己的声音就是他们自己耳中自己的声音。而他们的自我感觉也因此变好了。

Peter Nyikos
While this article does explain why our voices seem so different to us when played back, it does not touch upon the unpleasant fact: some people’s voices sound much better than other people’s voices. Most importantly: more authoritative, more harmonious, more “together.” It would be nice to have information on how to improve one’s voice along those lines.

虽然这篇文章确实解释了我们的嗓音听起来和录音大相径庭的原因，但并没有触及这个令人不快的事实：有些人的嗓音听上去就是比另一些人好听。最重要的是：会更有权威感、更悦耳、更“浑然一体”。如何根据这些指标改善自己的嗓音呢，要是能提供这方面的信息就好了。

As one whose two brothers have voices that sound similar to mine, I suspect that a lot of one’s voice is genetically determined. In our case, it seems some recessive genes are at work: our voices are different from those of either of our parents.

我的两个兄弟，他们的嗓音都很接近我的，我猜一个人的声音在很大程度上是由基因决定的。在我们这个案例中，似乎是某些隐性基因在起作用，因为我们的嗓音和我们双亲的嗓音差异很大。