"How can I improve my singing without listening to myself sing?" a bewildered student asked. Actually, you'll improve your singing a lot faster by NOT listening to your voice when you sing. Listening to yourself while you sing is one of the worst things you can do.

Don’t listen to yourself!

The worst thing you can do to yourself and your voice is listen to yourself while you are singing! It’s extremely distracting to focus on the sound of your voice, and you won’t hear yourself accurately anyway. The best way to hear exactly how you sound is to tape yourself and listen back to it.

Because of the way your physiology works, you don’t hear the same sound as the audience, so you never get an accurate sound if you listen to yourself while singing.

If you've ever heard a recording of your voice and thought "that doesn't sound like me at all," here's the truth. Yes, the recording does sound like you, just not the sound that YOU are used to hearing.

Here's why: your sound waves come straight through your resonators, that is, your face bones and your teeth, as the sound heads out of your mouth. So the audience or the recording device picks up your sound WITH resonance.

You don't hear that sound. You hear a combination of your "inter-cranial" sound, meaning the sound waves picked up behind your throat by your three bones in your ear plus the sound waves that travel from your mouth back around to your ears. The inter-cranial sound does not have resonance and is very muffled because it has to travel through body tissue, which dampens the sound and takes all the clarity out of it.

Here's what to focus on instead of listening to your sound: the rhythm, melody and lyrics in your mind. The more involved you are in "getting into" the song, rather than trying to listen to your singing voice, the better you will sound.