soundboard episode 002
00:00 // introduction
[ soundboard is a production of the austin audio lab ]
Gabe: Understanding the sound of your voice, and utilizing all of your resources to get the best sound. It’s all happening now, on soundboard, with Mark and Gabe.
[ opening track ]
Mark: Welcome everyone, and thanks for tuning into Episode 2 of soundboard. soundboard is an audio production podcast hosted by myself, Mark Stelter, and a man who needs no introduction if you already know him, Gabe Alvarez.
Gabe: On today’s episode, Mark’s going to be discussing why your voice sounds so different when you hear it recorded and played back to you than it does in your head.
Mark: And later, Gabe follows up on last episode’s What I Heard to talk about What You’ve Got. And with that, let’s press play.
[ tape transition ]
00:57 // why does my voice sound different?
written by Mark Stelter
So why is it that I think my voice sounds like this (cut mix to normal) and it actually sounds like this. As much as I wish I really had that Barry White sound, the reality is a bit different. But why is that the case? I mean, if I look into the mirror it’s not like my eyes see a substantially different version of myself than what everyone else sees, so why do my ears hear something so very different? They’re both senses after all and I’ve been relying on those for quite a while now.
The answer lies in the manner in which we perceive sound, which in this instance is twofold. The first is what you might expect, with the soundwave of your voice being conducted through the air and reaching your ears externally, just like any other sound. The second, is actually the internal vibrations of our vocal chords being transmitted directly through our own bone and tissue directly to a bone in our ears called the cochlea. The cochlea is a hollow, spiral shaped bone located in the inner ear that is essentially responsible for translating soundwaves into electrical impulses that can then be interpreted by the brain. In both instances, the sound is reaching the cochlea, but because the vibrations of our vocal chords are travelling internally, the structural properties of our own heads actually amplify the lower frequencies.
When you hear your own voice in a recording, you are only able to hear the soundwaves passing through the air, without the internal vibrations of your vocal chords and are hearing your voice the way everyone else does. If you want to hear an example of the opposite effect, try plugging your ears and speaking at a normal volume. Of course the sound is not completely isolated, but you are drastically reducing the external sound conducted by air that your brain is able to register. You can really feel the difference of your internal vibrations and what makes your voice sound like “your” voice.
Now to take this one step further, there are actually headphones that operate entirely on the ability of your cochlea to register internal vibrations. Bone conduction headphones. You heard that right, headphones that utilize the conductive properties of your skull to transmit audio by way of internal vibrations that are translated by your cochlea and sent straight up 0.0to your brain. Man, that’s a great name for a metal band now that I think of it. “Bone Conduction” Now, as you might imagine, there are several pros and cons to this approach. The audio quality is not as robust as you are sidestepping the use of your ears to pick up external sound, which is, you know kind of the point of ears. That being said, the fact that bone conduction headphones are at all viable I think is incredibly impressive. Additionally, because you don’t have anything physically in your ears, (the headphones sit just in front of them closer to your cheeks), your regular auditory senses can pick up what’s going on around you just as easily. I’m sure we’ve all been in the position of seeing someone look and talk at you while you have headphones in, only to take one out and ask, “oh sorry were you talking to me?” Then, if you’re like me, they give you an awkward look because they were definitely talking to the person right behind you. So you sheepishly put your headphone back in and pretend the whole thing never happened. BUT! If you’re out and about, they can also be very helpful to maintain your spatial awareness like hearing a car that ran a red light as you were about to cross the street.
Bone conduction headphones can also be especially beneficial for individuals that suffer from hearing loss, particularly if they have any damage to their eardrum. The way the vibrations are processed essentially fill the role of the eardrum allowing these individuals to hear stereo audio in a way that they would otherwise not be able to. Interestingly, intensive medical treatment for severe hearing loss operates on much the same principle. One form of treatment called a cochlear implant actually bypasses the damaged portions of the ear to deliver sound signals directly to the auditory nerve. A sound processor often implanted behind the ear captures external sounds and transmits them to electrodes implanted in the cochlea, just like a normally functioning ear would do. Then, those electrodes do the work of stimulating the cochlea and sending those electrical impulses to the brain which in turn recognizes them as sound. Major Deus Ex vibes. Or Cyberpunk if you’re not old enough for that reference.
So the reason our voices sound different when we hear them in a recording actually illustrates just how sensitive our senses can be. The way we perceive vibrations, both through the airwaves and through *our actual selves* makes a huge difference on how we sense the world around us. *Return to dropped bass voice* Now, I know I don’t really sound like this, *back to regular voice* but understanding how integral a simple vibration is to my conception of my voice is pretty eye opening. Or should I say ear opening? It really puts into perspective how we all have a unique take on everything we experience.
06:59 // what you’ve got, vol. 01
written by Gabe Alvarez
So last episode on soundboard, I took some time to revisit a field trip I’d taken out to Pedernales Falls State Park and took that opportunity to share what I heard along the way. If you missed that segment, we encourage you to go back and take a listen to our previous episode, and if you missed the sound effects we released from that field excursion, don’t worry we’ve got a link to our Central Texas Streams and Creeks royalty free sound pack in today’s show notes.
Now, last time I repurposed my field audio and produced a segment that I felt best represented my own experience navigating, exploring, and recording those sounds. As a producer, in this case when it comes to producing a podcast, it’s a critical skill to develop -- how best to take the assets you have, whether they be interviews, sounds, or music, and extract and develop the narrative that makes sense of it all.
In my experience, this holds especially true when it comes to producing non-fiction content -- you may end up with 4 hours of raw interview footage and 2 hours of ambient sounds that you need to condense into a 15 minute segment. To work like that, there is a craft. Choosing the pieces that represent the story you want to tell while allowing the story that is actually being told the opportunity to come through. The mechanics of a project like that are easy to teach, but in practice, the questions of “what do I need?” and “where do I need it?” and “what must be cut?” I think can only be answered within the context of each individual project.
And that’s all well and good and a very interesting topic to explore, but if you follow our work, you’ll know we spend a lot of time producing fiction content.
In particular, if you come into the podcasting ecosystem as an amateur -- and there’s no shame in that, anyone who ever developed a talent for any pursuit started as an amateur or a hobbyist -- then you probably know very well that you will work, at first, with very limited resources. And that’s a huge challenge. It’s a huge barrier, and sometimes that barrier prevents a project from ever progressing. But as you persist in your pursuit, you will eventually develop the technical skills, you will eventually gather the resources, whether they be equipment or software or libraries of sound and music to realize your project. And, to me, this is where the most valuable skill of all emerges.
The ability to make the most of what you have.
In my life, I can recall an endless string of memories asking an authority what the best piece of equipment to fit my need would be. What is the best microphone for recording? What is the best handheld recorder for field work? What is the best program for writing scripts or producing audio. And the best answer I ever got, consistently, was “the one you will use.”
And I think that really cuts to the truth of anything, maybe not just the technicalities of audio production. The best mic is the one you will use until you know all of its idiosyncrasies. The best recorder is the one you’ll carry with you and use. The best software is the one you’ll learn.
The best sound effects to collect are the ones you will use. Which brings us to today’s exercise.
While the second season of our sci-fi podcast Starcalled travels through the pre-production pipeline, we’ve been hard at work on another program, a western podcast called Grimwell County. Now, we’ll have some more information on both of these upcoming projects soon, but for now I want to take the opportunity to put our mindset into practice. Make the most of what we have. So to continue with our theme of central Texas field recordings and a western fiction project, we’ll build a quick trail scene using pieces I recorded on the fly.
[ sfx: buzzing cicadas fade in ]
As with any canvas, its emptiness can be intimidating at first. I like to start with a simple background layer, just to get some texture. I’ll use this clip I recorded of cicadas buzzing in a grove. It’s virtually nothing, but it immediately adds a lot of depth to our scene. We’re somewhere warm, maybe even hot. It’s midday. There’s something languorous to it -- maybe that’s my bias as someone who grew up in the South. But I’d like a little more complexity to this, I want to feel more that I’m in a dynamic space. Even if future layers will end up obscuring the effect to an extent, at least we have the option of evolving this sound. When it comes through the scene or the mix, it will come through.
So in my mind I’ll define our center channel as our “position” on the trail, and shift this cicada track toward the left channel by a completely arbitrary amount -- not all the way out there, but just a little off our current position.
[ sfx: sporadic bird song fades in ]
I’d like to balance out our right channel though. I want this scene to feel like we’re inhabiting a space between two similar but discreet ecological zones. So I’ll add another track, this time a more sparse track featuring some bird song, and I’ll shift it right by an arbitrary but lesser degree than our cicada track. To my taste, it feels like we could be on a bend in the trail, the treeline approaching us on the right with a smaller grove a bit removed from the trail to our left.
[ sfx: gentle stream bubbling fades in ]
Now, this sounds pretty alright, but it’s a little off balance for my taste, since we swung out the cicada track. To tighten this up, I’ll take a clip I recorded of a gentle stream and push it into our right channel, but drop it low in the mix. I want to fill up our right side with enough texture to nearly match the density of our cicada channel.
This end result? It’s not bad. Would we want to send this off to land in a big budget industry project? No, probably not, but for a project built on assets I’ve already got on hand it’s a great starting point. Because it’s a start. It’s a foundation to develop and build on, and this truly could be the base of anything you can imagine it to be.
[ sfx: alone on the trail, a rider mounts their horse and sets off ]
[ sfx: a baseball game in the distance, in the foreground, a driver enters an old car and turns the engine over ]
[ sfx: a crowd cheers at an airshow as a prop plane flies overhead ]
The backdrop to a lone gunslinger’s travels, the baseline of a rural town, the setting of an airshow -- if you let yourself imagine and experiment, you’ll find countless opportunities to create new inventions. And we didn’t even do anything to these tracks except to slap them together. It’s the ethos of sound design. To be flexible and be adaptive and get the most mileage out of the tools you have before you. Because there is no tool that exists for purchase that will ever compare to the ingenuity of an artist looking for possibility.
And just like with writing, the most difficult and most important step is not to produce the perfect, final product, but to have a first draft that you can look at and see for its true potential. Because when you are creating, the only rules you have are the rules you place yourself. Sounds are not disposable. The only limit to a sound’s versatility is your ability to reimagine it and to present it to an audience ready to imagine it too. And just to prove that point, here’s a sound I recorded on a broken microphone in 2015, rummaging through a box of miscellaneous junk I found in my closet.
[ sfx: a hand rummages indiscriminately through bric-a-brac of various material ]
Sound familiar?
[ sfx: cowboy mounting a horse; then again with the sound highlighted ]
[ sfx: a baseball game in the distance, someone enters a vehicle and turns the engine; then again with the sound highlighted ]
15:31 // closing
Mark: Thanks for listening to this episode of soundboard! I hope we were able to provide some insight into why your voice sounds the way it does, and that even if it’s not what you thought, it’s entirely unique and can be perfect for the right performance.
Gabe: You can find links to the gear we used and the sources we referenced for today’s episode in the show notes, or, on our blog post at austinaudiolab.com. This is the Austin Audio Laboratory, signing off for now.
[ music fades out ]