That Pesky Playback

Gosh, we still hate to hear ourselves talk ???? Weirdly, it doesn’t happen so much when we sing but if we record us talking we sometimes still go “is THAT what I sound like?!”. Like you said, it seems to be a natural thing that you “hear” yourself differently from within your own head than when you are being recorded. The more we do it the more we get used to it though.

When we record ourselves singing it is sometimes that we don’t realise we are pronouncing certain words weirdly, or wrong or with too much of a German accent until we listen back later.

Interestingly in the vast majority of your songs, when you sing, there is no discernible accent at all. With the Beatles too, from a NA perspective, can’t really hear any British accent at all in their songs. Then in their interviews you can hear the British accent, or is that a Liverpudian or Scouse accent to be more accurate? 🙂

I suspect that the main reason that accents are less obvious in singing than in speaking is the need to hit and sustain specific pitches, which washes out many of the distinctive differences in the qualities of the vowel sounds.

I never understood why,, but your explanation David makes sense. In San Francisco Mona and Lisa sounded like native Californians.

I keep forgetting that the internet knows everything. Here’s some British guy explaining it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ8RdLtZWlc

David, great video, thanks. That explains it in quite great depth, and it’s interesting about how American english accent is the default neutral. I wonder though what part of America is the most neutral? My older brother grew up in Canada and has been in LA now going onto 35 years or so, and he always tells us Canadians have an accent, which I don’t notice.

Jung, to my ear the most “neutral” English is spoken in the Montana / Alberta / Saskatchewan area, straddling the border.

A Canadian accent? I don’t know what you’re talking “aboot”!

One exception to the American sounding English band was when the Beatles did Til There Was You. Concerning the birds he never ‘sawr’ them winging. I first heard the song in 1964 when I was 10 years old and it caught me by surprise. I guess it was the English way of saying the word saw (or Liverpool way). But, it crept into the song. Mike.

Mike, we actually discussed that very example a few months ago in a thread titled “Till There Was You”.

I agree, I sing at our Church and now with Covid we are live streaming the masses and you can go back and listen and I say…Oh my I thought I sang that song much better than it sounds, so no touching up it is raw.