Abstract
The purpose of this work is to evaluate and to compare the acoustic properties of oesophageal voice and voice prosthesis speech production. A group of 14 Italian laryngectomized patients were considered: 7 with oesophageal voice and 7 with tracheoesophageal voice (with phonatory valve). For each patient the spectrogram obtained with the phonation of vowel/a/ (frequency intensity, jitter, shimmer, noise to harmonic ratio) and the maximum phonation time were recorded and analyzed. For the patients with the valve, the tracheostoma pressure, at the time of phonation, was measured order to obtain important information about the in vivo pressure necessary to open the phonatory valve to enable speech.
Highlights
Laryngeal cancer is the second most common upper aerodigestive cancer, in particular, it causes pain, dysphagia, and impedes speech, breathing, and social interactions.The management of advanced cancers often includes radical surgery, such as a total laryngectomy which involves the removal of the vocal cords and, as a consequence, the loss of voice
The patient is deprived of the vibrating sound source and the energy source for voice production, as the air stream from the lungs is no longer connected to the vocal tract
The results are shown in Table 2; it is possible to note that the tracheoesophageal voices The surgical prosthetic methods (TEP) have a lower standard deviation for the vocal parameters, the TEP voices are more repeatable and have better acoustic characteristics
Summary
The management of advanced cancers often includes radical surgery, such as a total laryngectomy which involves the removal of the vocal cords and, as a consequence, the loss of voice. Total laryngectomy represents an operation that drastically affects respiratory dynamics and phonation mechanisms, suppressing the normal verbal communication, it is disabling and has a detrimental effect on the individual’s quality of life. For some laryngectomy patients, the loss of speech is more important than survival itself. The patient is deprived of the vibrating sound source (the vocal folds and laryngeal box) and the energy source for voice production, as the air stream from the lungs is no longer connected to the vocal tract. Since 1980, different methods for regaining phonation have been developed, the most important are (1) the use of an electro-larynx, (2) conventional speech therapy, (3) surgical prosthetic methods [1,2,3]
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