Most people when they hear a recording of themselves are surprised to hear that [their voice sounds differently](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130913-why-we-hate-hearing-our-own-voice) from what they hear inside their head.
Does someone with perfect pitch hear themselves differently?
Are they so well attuned musically to know how to adjust to the difference?
In: Biology
perfect pitch means if you tell them to sing any specific note on the scale, they will do so accurately without referencing an instrument
So what happens when you talk is that there are soundwaves propagating out from your mouth as well as inside your head towards your ear canal. People listening to you and microphones only pick up the sound waves coming out from your mouth. When you speak you hear an interference of both of the sound from inside your head and the one from your mouth. This is why it feels awkward to hear yourself on a recording – it’s not the same sound wave you’re used to.
People with perfect pitch are people that can perfectly distunguish different frequencies of sound from each other. They can, with a little bit of practice, tell what a C# on the third octave is without hearing another tone of reference. How this impacts how they interpret their own voice, I’m not completely sure. However, the frequency of your voice doesn’t change depending on whether it’s going through your skull or air, so if I can guess I’m going to say that they experience their own voice the same way we do – maybe except for the fact that they can tell which frequency they are talking in.
Your voice sounding differently in recordings isn’t a change in pitch, but in timbre. When you sing, you don’t produce one single pure tone, but a complex series of overtones that gives each voice a slightly different sound. The difference between how you hear yourself and how a recording of you sounds is a change in which overtones you hear more than others. The pitch stays the same. This is why you will sometimes see people cover one ear while singing harmony, so they can better hear their own voice and keep it in tune.
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