People rarely like to hear their own voices on recordings. They sound fake, or like someone else.
For neuroscientists, that’s more than a curiosity. The origins of the hallucinations remain a mystery, but one hypothesis is that when people hear voices, they are hearing their own thoughts disguised as someone else’s by a quirk of the brain.
Scientists would like to understand which parts of the brain allow us to recognize ourselves by speaking, but studying this using recordings of people’s own voices has proven difficult. When we speak, we not only hear our voice with our ears, but also feel it as sound vibrations travel through the bones of the skull.
A recently published study attempted a solution. A team of researchers investigated whether people could recognize their voices more accurately if they wore conduction headphones, that is, They transmit sound via vibration.
Recordings of our voices tend to sound higher-pitched than we anticipate, said Pavo Orepic, a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology who led the study. The vibration of the skull makes your voice sound lower to you than it does to a listener. But even adjusting your recordings to sound lower doesn’t recreate the experience of hearing your own voice. As an alternative, the team tried using bone conduction headphones, which are commercially available and often rest on the listener’s cheekbones, just in front of the ear.
The team recorded volunteers saying the syllable “ah” and then mixed each recording with other voices to produce sounds composed of 15 percent of a given person’s voice, then 30 percent, and so on. So they had some participants listen to sounds through bone conduction headphones, while others used regular headphones, and another group tried laptop speakers. The volunteers indicated whether they thought each sound was similar to their own voice.
People with conduction hearing aids were more likely to correctly identify their own voices, the team found. When the team tested the same experiment with the voices of the participants’ friends, they found that bone conduction headphones made no difference in helping people identify familiar voices. It was just recognizing their own voices that became easier, suggesting that devices they are recreating some of what we feel and hear as we speak.
If scientists can understand how the brain constructs its self-concept from sound, Orepic said, perhaps they can figure out what’s different in people who hear voices in their heads that aren’t their own.
By: Veronique Greenwood
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6589544, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-02-27 23:10:07
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