Use headphones or earplugs to block out most of your own speech.

Choose a brief reading passage (such as the “Rainbow Passage”) and record yourself reading the passage once with most of your hearing blocked, and once without headphones or earplugs. Describe in as much detail as you can the differences between the two recordings.

The Rainbow Passage:

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act like a prism and form a rainbow. The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it.

When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.