Do you think people know when they sound terrible? I knew someone in MI who had that Michigander accent–nasally and just awful. Her name was “Jaaaaannn” if that makes any sense. I don’t think she was aware of it, but don’t know. Can someone who sounds like Janice on Friends really not hear that?
Do you know you have a bad voice? If so, why don’t you change it? In my late teens, I worked to change my voice a bit to make it more pleasant to the ear. It didn’t seem that hard to me, but it was only a small change, to be less nasal.
I beleive that people are very affected by bad voices. I know it is a huge deal to me–I have a hard time warming up to people with grating voices.
When I was younger I worked very hard when answering phones at work for the lower pitched “sexy” kind of voice. kinda carried over, I still do it, but mostly because I don’t like the higher pitched voices (sound more whiny to me now) and a lot less to sound “sexy”.
And yet, I still don’t like how my voice sounds in recordings.
I think the problem is that we have such a hard time hearing our own voices the way other people hear them, that it makes a lot of people oblivious to the “problem”.
I am ultra sensitive to voices / accents. And yes, yes, we *all *have accents, yada yada, yada, but I really do wish everyone (American, that is) spoke as close to broadcasting English (or whatever you call it)as possible. Some days it’s all I can do not to wing my three hole punch at the stupid Philly native I’m forced to sit next to. Why the fuck oh why can she not pronounce the final "d"in words. I don’t want to hear about the goddamn “salit” you’re having for lunch and those inserts you’re ordering are targeted, not “targadit”.
Oh, and the name of the guy that approves your requests is pronounced AIR - ik, not Errrick. :mad:
My daughter assures me that my voice is fine, but I think it sounds unpleasant and I’ve tried to do something about it, without any real sucess.
I have kind of a raspy voice, as if I just smoked a carton and downed a fifth. It’s been this way since I lost my voice at a Def Leppard concert back in the early 90s. I went a couple of weeks with no voice, about three months with an unreliable voice, and ended up with what I have now. I also wish I could pitch it a little differently without concentration, but I can’t.
At least I don’t have a grating accent; mine is pretty much standard broadcasting.
I have a kind of weird voice. I’ve been told that I very noticably slur my “s”'s (think Sylvester the Cat). I even went to speech therapy for it when I was in elementary school.
The problem is that I can’t hear it. Sometimes, if I try, I can hear it a little bit, but unless I’m thinking about it I don’t remember to try to correct for it.
The part that vexes me is that, when I hear other people with the same issue, it really really grates on me, and I try to avoid those people. So I know that others are having the same reaction to me…
My whole life, I have thought people that lisp were hilarious. Hilarious.
My best friend and I would make fun of them all the time. (amongst ourselves, of course).
Now, I have buck teeth. So I should have known that I probably have a bit of a speech impediment myself.
Well, I didn’t know.
It was just this year that I video taped myself saying the words “Saturday, the 24th” for a promotion that I was doing, when I realized…I lisp!
Wow, I guess you really can “break” your voice. I heard that Eddie “Rochester” Anderson’s voice was raspy and hoarse because as a youngster he had a job hawking newspapers on the street corner in Oakland, where he lived. The loud yelling he had to do to sell the papers permanently affected his voice. However, I can’t imagine him without it.
I have a lisp, a stutter, a nasally Midwestern accent, and now I’ve accidentally acquired some of my husband’s Philly accent. I used to be able to overcome my bad voice, and was even a radio announcer for a while, but now I have so much hearing damage that I can’t hear my own voice properly when I speak. If I think I sound bad, I shudder to think how bad I really sound to other people!
I have a big problem with this at work. A team member I have to collaborate with closely has an incredibly nasal, whiny voice. It doesn’t help that for conversation he invariably draws from a small collection of irritating catchphrases. He’s competent at his job and I don’t have a big problem with him otherwise, but I just can’t stand to listen to that voice for more than a few minutes at a time.
Eventually I asked my boss to move me to a different office. This was a little awkward, but less so than my yelling at him to shut up would have been. I don’t think there were any good alternatives, since there’s no polite way to ask somebody to speak differently.
Unfortunately a few days later I realized that there’s a lady in the new office who sounds just like Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine.
One thing I do know is that you sound very different to yourself than you do to everyone else. That’s why everyone says recordings don’t sound like them, when everyone else disagrees.
I had to learn this to learn to sing classical music. Now I tend to record myself before performance, and make modifications.
A relative has the most annoying voice and the most laugh. Oh, it’s awful, especially in a public place when everyone turns to look. She doesn’t have the faintest clue and she is of the personality that if she did knoow, would only try to exaggerate it even more so more people could be annoyed. :rolleyes:
There was a character in the movie Auntie Mame that had a grating, nasal, exaggerated New York accent. Ah, yes, “Agnes Gooch”. I think it was supposed to be funny but it wasn’t. Not the first time she opened her mouth, and certainly not the fifty-first time.
My wife’s voice is a bit like Marge Simpson’s, due to an operation on her throat when she was a toddler.
However, I don’t notice it anymore (ahh, the power of love :p) and only know that it’s like Marge because that’s what I was thinking the first year I knew her. I’m pretty it’s just my perception, not her voice that has changed since then .
Get to know some real New Yawkers, like Janice from friends, and you will find more grating voices than you can stand. Fran Drescher is a perfect example of someone who used her real and grating voice on a show (The Nanny) set in New Yawk, where she was raised.
I cannot stand to hear recordings of myself. I have a standard midwestern accent, but it sounds almost like singing when I talk (and I don’t think in a good way. I always think of JoAnn Worley when I hear it replayed to me.) I have a very nice singing voice, but the talking…OY! No one I know has admitted that it’s annoying to them, but I’m embarrassed even when I try to mask it.
I recently spent several minutes on the phone with someone who had a unpleasantly pitched voice combined with almost no inflection–almost a monotone, with the “tone” being a high raspy one. I kept thinking, “You got married with that voice? Had children? Because I would have to kill one or both of us if we actually shared a residence.”