Abstract
To identify the immediate effects of voiced vibration and vocal fry exercises on healthy subjects by means of acoustic parameters and high-speed kymography. Thirty healthy subjects (18 women and 12 men, aged from 19 to 45 years old) participated in this study. The voices were recorded at the range of 44.100 samples/second, before and after of the vocal exercises. We developed a computational routine to extract jitter and shimmer. High-speed kymography was generated from laryngeal images for the analysis of the phase times: closed (CPh), open (OPh), of closing (cPh) and of opening (oPh) and used the paired t-Student test and the Mann-Whitney test, with a significance level of 0.05. After voiced vibrations, acoustic parameters showed reduced jitter for both genders (p=0.018 for men and p<0.01 for women) and reduced shimmer for female voices (p<0.01). There was a decrease in CPh (p=0.046) and cPh (p=0.026) and an increase in OPh (p=0.05) in female vocal folds. After vocal fry, we identified decreased jitter (p<0.01) in female voices and cPh (p=0.026) in male vocal folds. We observed more positive immediate effects of the voiced vibrations, mainly in voice quality and vocal folds among females. Nevertheless, studies with larger male sample and investigation of the appropriate time of vocal fry are necessary to confirm the results of this search.
Highlights
In the Speech Language Pathology and Audiology clinic, vocal techniques are used for vocal improvement or for treating vocal disorders
After the exercise of vocal fry, a statistical difference was observed for the closing phase in male vocal folds (Table 4)
The results of the acoustic analysis demonstrated that the female voices were most influenced by vocal exercises after voiced vibration, and perturbation parameters significantly decreased for the female gender (p
Summary
In the Speech Language Pathology and Audiology clinic, vocal techniques are used for vocal improvement or for treating vocal disorders. Speech language pathology and audiology aims at a healthy emission and at the prevention of phonotraumas during vocal production[1,2]. In the past few years, researchers have been making efforts to prove the physiological effects that vocal exercises have on vocal quality and on the vocal folds of healthy individuals or those with dysphonia[3,4]. The first one is the voiced vibration, which is commonly used for most of the vocal disorders[5,6] since its effects are noticed by the ears of the pathologist and the patient[2,5]. The other one is the vocal fry, presenting several therapeutic indications, even though it is still not used much for presenting numberless divergences among researchers and speech language pathologists[4,7,8]
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