How can we sing in tune, given a perfect ear for music, if we always hear ourselves lower than we actually sound?
According to this BBC article, we hear ourselves bassy compared to how we sound to others.
What makes a recording of our voice sound so different... and awful? It’s because when you speak you hear your own voice in two different ways. Greg Foot explains all.
The first is through vibrating sound waves hitting your ear drum, the
way other people hear your voice. The second way is through vibrations
inside your skull set off by your vocal chords. Those vibrations
travel up through your bony skull and again set the ear drum
vibrating. However as they travel through the bone they spread out and
lower in pitch, giving you a false sense of bass. Then when you hear a
recording of your voice, it sounds distinctly higher.
How do we then sing in tune to a song? We must be doing a constant pitch correction while trying to reproduce a previously heard sound. How does this pitch correction actually work?
EDIT 2016.02.09:
Added link to, and a quote from the BBC article which I've read before asking this question, and which reconfirmed a wrong assumption on which my question was based.
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The BBC article is confusing pitch with frequency response.
When one says your voice sounds lower to you than it does to other people, this is referring NOT to the pitch of your voice (the dominant vibrations-per-second frequency), but to the overall timbre and tone.
Any sound made by acoustic means consists of an entire spectrum of pitches, where certain frequencies on this spectrum stand out more than others. The relative strength of these frequencies causes the phenomena of timbre, for example, how Bob and Jack both singing a C4 can still sound like Bob and Jack to the listener. This is also why if you have a multi-band equalizer, a change in any one of the EQ bands will have an effect on your voice, even if you are singing the same pitch each time.
So to specifically address your question, when you are listening to your own voice, what you are hearing includes physical vibrations being transmitted inside your own body from your vocal cords and oral cavity to your cochlea. Lower frequencies are conducted much more efficiently this way than they are through the air to the eardrums of all of your listeners.
So, you are getting more response from the bass frequencies of your own voice than an outside listener would, but the pitch isn't changing. It's like being inside your own head activates the "bass boost" button just like on an old tape deck.
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