For our first assignment for Talking and Storytelling, we were asked to record ourselves talking to two people, one that we knew well and one that we didn’t, and to transcribe a minute of one of these conversations.
I recorded conversations with my partner, Rita, and her roommate, Akmyrat. Here’s a transcription of my conversation with Akmyrat:
Oren: No no no, it’s just odd to listen to yourself, right? It makes me very self-conscious about your speech mannerisms and all that stuff, you know?
Akmyrat: It is, it is weird. I mean, I think it’s also weird because we hear ourselves through our inner ear vs. our outer ear.
Oren: Yeah, and so when you hear yourself recorded, it never - you always - it doesn’t sound like your voice, or it sounds exactly like your voice, but how everyone else hears it, not how you hear it.
Akmyrat: Exactly.
Oren: Like, um —
Akmyrat: It’s like —
Oren: Whenever I hear myself, like, recorded, I always kinda think like, “Oh, man, I sound like a jerk.” Like, because my voice has a certain quality to it that I don’t hear when I speak normally, right?
Akmyrat: Yeah. I think it’s interesting how singers actually get over that. Um, because I know a couple of people that sing, and they, um, have no problem listening to themselves.
Oren: Yeah, well I imagine that it’s like anything — you do it enough and it just kinda loses all weirdness. Like it just becomes normal and you accept that, you know?