My Voice

I am a baritone. Possibly a bass – I'd usually get the bass part when I was singing regularly. I was a pretty decent singer, too; not extraordinary, of course not, but good enough to receive complements after the recitals. Anyway, I have a deep voice. But, hey! Don't take my word for it. Here's a recording. (I'm reading the text of some old Dominic Deegan strip, for no good reason. Ignore the words if you wish.)

So, you know what I really sound like. Cool.

That's not the voice I hear in my head when I speak. I hear a tenor.

Okay, maybe if I concentrate on the actual response of my auditory nerves, I don't. But when I'm typing this and speaking it in my head, that's a tenor. I have no idea who. Maybe it's my voice from before puberty. But my self-voice-image is so drastically different from the sounds I actually emit that I don't even recognize the guy in the recordings speaking my lines. It sounds kinda like A—, who was a guy in my Junior High Voice Class, but I know it's not, it's no-one with whom I am familiar. Only it isn't no-one with whom I'm familiar, because it's me.

I do recognize the guy in the mirror, though. It's just my voice that's really strange.

Does anyone else have such a strong disconnect between their mental voices and their physical ones?