Is anyone aware of techniques or research on this?
Personally I don’t know of any specific research but afaik the reason why our voices sound terrible to us when recorded is because they’re missing the bass that’s transmitted through the skull, i.e. they sound higher pitched on recording. So I’d try increasing the amplitude of the lower frequencies on the EQ, it’ll take a bit of fiddling to get the right balance.
I’ve found in my experience that over the years my internal voice updated to match how I sound when recorded. So when I hear myself speaking on a recording it’s much less jarring now since it feels much more like how I predicted it would sound.
Yup same, after a bunch of podcasting I don’t hear any difference between my voice in my head and in a recording.
Which means that modifying a recording to match what you hear really can’t be boiled down to a series of steps, because it’s highly subjective and probably not consistent.
As a singer who has recorded myself not only singing, but also talking for thousands of collective hours of recording time, this is my experience as well. I can’t even hear the difference anymore, and I haven’t been able to since probably hour 10.
A degree in audio engineering.
It’s possible and there had been research done into it, but it’s a hard problem and not just a question of slapping an off-the-shelf EQ on it.
I think you could probably get a close approximation by first close miking your recording, and then using Adobe audition, apply the dereverb filter to your recording, roll off the highs probably above 6 to 8000 Hertz or so by 12-18 db, and boost the fundamental frequencies and 1st overtone that the speaking voice is recorded in probably six decibels or so, (a rough guess would be something like 120 hz and 240 hz for men and 200 hz and 400 hz for women, use the spectral graph to find for sure), and then put a compressor on the whole thing to limit the difference between the loudest and quietest pitch to somewhere around 70 decibels or so, and then finally put a very light reverb with a lot of damping on it. We’re talking almost so little reverb that you can’t even tell that there is reverb applied to it unless you a/b the sound.
Things like that should account for the difference in bone conduction, the difference in how a microphone will pick up your voice and the rest of the room, etc., But it will probably need a lot of tweaking to your specific application to sound exactly right.
A very simple approximation of your voice as it’s heard if you’re facing someone when speaking would be using a unidirectional mic and recording yourself with the mic pointing the opposite direction as it normally would be (in other words— with the polarity reversed).
A slightly better approximation would be if you did the same thing but with two unidirectional mics pointed at slight angles (with the polarity still reversed) to simulate the placement of your ears.
Obviously the quality of the mic would factor in as well—you’d want mics with a flat frequency curve. To get even pickier you’d also want to use headphones or speakers with a flat frequency response to listen to it.
“…the way we hear ourselves?”
Yes they want to hear their own voice on a recording but make the audio sound close to the way it usually does from their perspective as the speaker…
Yeah that wouldn’t really do it. That ignores the boneand body Conduction which would be a significant contribution to the sound you hear. I’d expect a huge low frequency boost.
M
Here you go.
You record the vibration of all the little receiver hairs in your ear as you speak. You simultaneously record into a microphone at the same time.
You train a neural network to transform the sound file from the recording into the set of vibration states it corresponds with in your ear hairs.
Then you just run the resulting model on the sound file, and magnetically vibrate the ear hairs in the way the model predicts.
Boom! 1st person speaking voice experience.
Please God no. I cannot fathom how people manage to hear my real voice.
I sound so much better inside my skull
I mean isn’t that what OP is trying to figure out? A way for people to hear how you sound inside your skull.
My guess is there’s some subjective components to it that simple changes wouldn’t be able to adjust to, each person will have to do the changes themselves to make it match what they’re hearing…
I’ve been thinking about this exact same thing just today. Spooky.
I’m not convinced it’s possible. My internal voice has a different accent, not just different acoustic properties.
Not your inner monologue, they mean your actual physical spoken voice, as heard from inside your head.
If you’ve never done this before, a really great way to hear what your voice sounds like to other people is to stand about a foot away from a 90° corner in your house and talk normally.
Your actual voice will bounce off of the walls, making it much easier for you to hear what you sound like to others.
Professional singers use this trick early on in their training so that they can practice their tone for their singing.
Ah I see, thanks
I always wondered if this is possible.
