How to Hear One's Self.
You can do many things with a telephone; but the phonograph came first, and it hasn't yet been superseded. There are some unexpected uses of the phonograph, and one of them is this,—it teaches us the defects in our own voices.
Burns longed (or wrote that he longed) to see himself as others saw him, —a sight that would have been very edifying the evenings he got you. But not even Burns dreamed of the possibility of hearing himself as others heard him.
Perhaps he didn't think that was necessary. Perhaps you yourself have no idea but that you know your own voice; but you don't.
The roof of it is this: let a group of friends, you among them, talk one after another into the phonograph, and listen to the tones that issue forth again. You will not think your own voice is natural, but your friends will. On the other hand, your friends' voices will all sound natural to you, but not, in any case, to the person who originated the tones.
So well is this now understood, that singers make use of the phonograph to discover for themselves the faults of their singing, hearing themselves, actually for the first time, through the aid of that vibrating disk of metal.
And the reason for the superiority of the phonograph as a reporter to you of your own voice? It is because, when you speak, the sound comes to your ears not only through the air, but through your teeth, your jawbone, and your skull. It is so modified by all these, that when it reaches you through the air alone, just as it reaches your friends, you won't own it as yours.
I hardly dare to tack a moral on to this, the point is so obvious. It is this: never be sure that your own idea of yourself is the correct one till it is confirmed by some unprejudiced echo from the outer world!