Making a Podcast: Cringing at Your Own Voice

I am getting used to hearing my own voice. Strange, I know. I hear myself every day. But not through headphones. I don't scrutinize my pitch and inflection. I just use my voice to communicate. Once it's been recorded and is playing back to me via Quicktime, I can analyze just how nasal and oddly casual this voice, my voice, sounds. I have to face it. I don't sound remotely like Terry Gross. Is this what I sound like to everyone? Horrors.

Hopefully we only sound foreign and awful to ourselves. My theory is that the awfulness, the cringe factor of hearing your own voice, isn't about the actual quality of your voice. It's about the self-consciousness--that when we replay a voicemail or a sound file of ourselves it creates a disjuncture between past and present, consciousness and body. A version of ourselves from the past is talking to our current self in the present. We are hearing from ourselves outside of our own head. This is not normal.

I'll get over the disgust at the sound of my own voice. I have to for the podcast. I'm already growing mildly fond of the casualitis that marks my voice as I re-listen to my audio files. As I edit, I'll hear my voice for hours at a time. I'll slice it and dice it to achieve my desired effect. Maybe by the end of the process, I'll even adore the sound of my own voice. I'll be a voice narcissist. Maybe Terry Gross will begin to dream of sounding just like me. Maybe Ira Glass will be saying, "Hey, can we get that Delia DeCourcy on the show? Doesn't matter what the segment is. We just have to have that voice."