Your recorded voice is the one everyone else hears

You hear yourself in a video somebody else filmed and the first thing you think is that the microphone was bad. It was not: that thin, alien voice is exactly the one your mother, your friends and the people you work with have been hearing all your life. The device is not distorting you; it is taking away something only you had.

When you speak, your own voice reaches you along two paths at once: through the air, like everyone else, and from the inside, through the bones of your skull. That second path carries low tones particularly well, so the voice you hear yourself in is deeper, wider and more authoritative than the one leaving your mouth. It is the same mechanism that makes a bitten apple sound like a demolition to you while nobody beside you notices. A recording only picks up the air path.

Two psychologists from Kansas, Philip Holzman and Clyde Rousey, described that jolt in 1966 and called it voice confrontation.

Record yourself for thirty seconds reading anything and listen to it three times in a row: by the third it stops being embarrassing. That is the only rehearsal you need before a video interview.