Short-term effect of humming on vocal quality

Humming is a conservative voice therapy technique used to facilitate easy and efficient natural voice production. It is a technique used in treating voice disorders due to vocal hyperfunction, vocal abuses and/or misuses. However, few efficacy studies of humming are available in the literature. The present study was a prospective study which set out to investigate the changes in vocal quality demonstrated by eight female subjects with hyper functional dysphonia (six with vocal nodules and two with chronic laryngitis) and eight female subjects with normal voice following two sessions of training using humming per se. Voice recordings were taken before and after the humming exercises. Three judges rated the roughness and breathiness of these samples independently using the GRBAS scheme with a 10-point visual analogue rating scale. Acoustic analyses were also carried out to measure the average fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer and harmonic to noise ratio. Both groups of subjects demonstrated a significant improvement in perceptual roughness (p <0.05) but no change in the breathiness rating and the acoustic measures. These preliminary findings provide some evidence that humming alone can at least bring about short-term improvement in perceptual rough vocal quality

Acoustics · Audiology · Breathy voice · Hum · Jitter · Laryngitis · Perception · Phonation · Speech recognition · Voice · Voice therapy · Computer Science · Medicine · Phonetics and Phonology Research · Psychology · Speech Recognition and Synthesis · Voice and Speech Disorders

• Limitations of perturbation measures in clinical acoustic voice analysis

  Edwin M-L Yiu•Asia Pacific Journal of Speech…•1999

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