We don't write the same as we speak. Through sound language we take care of many details and adapt intonation to repeat key ideas, avoid misunderstandings, confusion or double meanings, or to do just the opposite. And the human voice is the most important sound in our environment, possibly the one we hear the most throughout our lives. If the speaker is a known person, we can identify them through their voice, activating the visual image that we have of them stored in our memory, an ability that appears around seven months of age. It is difficult for us to recognize our voice In some way, our voice is very specific, it says a lot about us, it is one of our business cards to the world and with it the people around us form a stereotype, not always accurate, of us when They know us. And what a loud voice transmits to us is very different from what comes to us from a loud, energetic and booming voice. The same happens with a high-pitched, cascading, metallic or silvery voice. For some time now it has been possible to have, through artificial intelligence, voice recognition, the ease of which is to enable communication between humans and computer systems. Through a recognition system, the words that a human being emits naturally can be detected and understood. It is evident that 'machines' can recognize us, but what about us? Do we recognize ourselves in a recording? Surely on more than one occasion we have heard ourselves in an audio or in a voice note and we have not liked it at all, we identify that voice as strange, foreign to us. It seems different to us and, as a general rule, of poorer quality, very unradio-friendly. And if we add to this that the people around us corroborate that, in fact, this is how our voice sounds, the degree of strangeness is even greater. In a classic study, carried out more than five decades ago, a group of volunteers were subjected to different stimuli to check to what extent they recognized themselves in them. The results were shocking: only a 38% was able to recognize his voice immediately. More recently, in 2010, another study verified the speed of self-recognition, in this case the surprise was huge: the 90% achieved it. Two different channels for the same version When we speak our vocal cords vibrate to produce the sound, which comes out through the mouth and travels through the air to the external part of our ear, where it comes into contact with the eardrum causing a vibration. . Hearing through the air is the way we perceive the voices of the people around us, friends and strangers with whom we have a conversation. The tympanic vibration reaches the inner ear, specifically an anatomical area called the cochlea or snail that translates the sound into an electrical impulse, which finally reaches the brain through the auditory nerve. In some way, the cortical areas process the stimulus and make an 'average' between the two pathways - the air and the bone - and the result is that they identify that voice as ours, as their own, yes, slightly deeper than how the others listen. Our words, those we generate in the larynx, also follow another, more direct path, through the bones of the skull. Intuitively we all know this, that is why when we sing and want to tune what we do is cover our ears, to cancel the arrival of information through the air. MORE INFORMATION news No Why do most fruits tend to be spherical? news No A group of doctors denounces the death of twelve monkeys in Elon Musk's brain chip trials This path – the bone one – is made through a 'pavement' with higher density histological structures, for this reason its travelers have more serious frequencies . This explains why when we listen to the recorded version of our voice, the one that only has the component that is transported through the air, we falsely perceive it as higher pitched.
