Original Scientific Articles

Voice condition assessment and the effect of rehabilitation in vocal professionals

---

Abstract

Introduction: . The human voice is an important characteristic that enables the distinction of human from other living beings. Oth erwise, it represents a picture of a person ́s personality, his health, mental and emotional state. The research aims are to determine the voice characteristics of vocal professionals with diagnosed vocal cord nodules by subjective voice assessment and objective voice mea surement before and after vocal rehabilitation.

Methods: . This study has involved 25 examinees, aged 23 to 56. The subjective voice assessment was conducted with the Voice Handicap Index - VHI questionnaire and the objective voice measurement by a computerized laboratory for voice analysis ‘’Kay Elemetrics’’. The ob tained data were processed using descriptive and analytical statistics.

Results: . Before the vocal rehabilitation and the subjective and ob jective voice measurements, the examinees had greater psychosocial difficulties associated with their voice quality. After two months of vocal rehabilitation, there has been a significant improvement in the voice of all subjects on the VHI scale. A statistically significant and highly statistically significant improvement have been noticed in six out of seven analyzed parameters of vocal A, by the objective mea surement of voice. Namely, the obtained values - the percentage of jitter Jitt (%), the percentage of shimmer Shim (%), the relative av erage perturbation value RAP (%) and the coefficient of fundamen tal frequency variation - vFo were highly statistically significant (p < 0.01). The VTI - voice turbulence index and the SPI - soft phonation index also improved, the observed difference was statistically signif icant (p < 0.05), while the observed difference in the FTRI parameter was not statistically significant (p > 0.05).

Conclusion: . Vocal rehabilitation has influenced the improvement of the voice quality, which means that the results obtained by objective voice measurements were more in accordance with the results of the subjective voice assessment.

Keywords: voice, vocal rehabilitation, measurement, acoustic voice analysis, perceptual voice evaluation

Rights: Authors retain copyright.