Why do I sound nasally

Say a sentence with no m, n or ng sounds in it, something like a bright sky today. Say it once normally, then again while pinching your nose closed.

If the two versions sound the same, air is not escaping through your nose on those sounds, which means you are not actually nasal in the technical sense. If the pinched version sounds noticeably different, some sound is routing through the nasal cavity that does not need to.

Most people who search this pass the test, which tells you the problem is somewhere in the recording rather than in the voice. That is the good outcome, because the recording is the part you can change this afternoon.

Nasal is mostly a frequency balance: too much energy in the upper midrange around 1 to 2 kHz relative to the low end. Plenty of things produce that without your nose being involved at all.

Distance is the big one. A foot away from a directional microphone you lose the proximity effect that supplies the low end, and what is left is midrange. Move to four to six inches and a lot of nasality disappears on its own.

Angle matters too. Speaking down into a microphone from above, which is what happens with a laptop or a mic on a desk while you look at a screen, emphasises the nasal path. Bring it up to mouth height and speak across it rather than into it.

A small room with parallel hard walls builds up energy in exactly the frequency range that sounds nasal. People describe the result as boxy, and boxy and nasal are very close neighbours.

Test it by recording the same sentence in two places: your usual spot, then somewhere with soft furnishings, a wardrobe full of clothes, a sofa, a bed. If the second one sounds fuller and less pinched, you found it.

The fix is not acoustic panels. Something soft behind you and something soft behind the microphone covers most of it, and a duvet over a clothes rail is a genuinely effective vocal booth.

Some people genuinely do route more sound through the nasal cavity, usually by holding the soft palate low and speaking with a fairly closed jaw. Both are habits rather than anatomy, and both respond to attention.

The sensation you are after is the start of a yawn: the soft palate lifts and the back of the mouth opens. Speak a sentence while deliberately holding that shape and you will hear the sound move forward and down.

Congestion does it too. If this is recent and you also have a blocked nose, it is a cold rather than a technique problem. And if your voice has always been noticeably nasal and nothing here moves it, that is a conversation for a doctor or a speech therapist rather than an audio guide.

If a recording is already made and sounds pinched, a gentle EQ cut in the 1 to 2 kHz region usually softens it. Keep the cut narrow and modest. Take out too much and the voice loses intelligibility, because that range carries a lot of consonant detail.

Adding back some body below 200 Hz often does more than cutting does, because the perception of nasality is about the balance between the two. Lifting the low end fixes the ratio without touching the clarity.

This is a rescue, not a workflow. If every episode needs the same corrective EQ, change the distance and the room instead and stop paying for it twice.

Fix the distance, fix the room, and if you still hear it, remember what you are comparing against. The voice in your head has extra low end that nobody else has ever received, so your recording will always sound thinner and brighter to you than it does to anyone listening.

Nobody has ever stopped listening to a podcast over resonance. They stop when the episodes stop. Get the setup right once, then spend the attention on what you are saying.