Purpose
Correlating the Voice-Related Quality of Life (VRQOL), perceptual-auditory and acoustic assessment of teachers with vocal complaints.
Methods
The study included 74 teachers aged between 20 and 62 years (mean 38.75 years). Self-assessment of VRQOL, voice perceptual-auditory assessment, acoustic voice analysis of glottal and spectrographic source, in narrowband (NB) and wideband (WB) and relevant statistical analysis were carried out.
Results
There was a negative correlation between VRQOL and fundamental frequency (f0), maximum f0 and standard deviation of f0; roughness and amplitude variation. There was a positive correlation between VRQOL and darkening of the tracing around the vocal spectrogram, definition and number of harmonics in NB; overall degree of vocal and soft phonation index, presence of noise at high frequencies in the WB; overall degree of vocal disorders, darkening the 1st formant and higher definition of the 2nd formant in WB; breathiness and percentage jitter, absolute jitter, relative average of perturbation, smoothed pitch perturbation quotient, pitch perturbation quotient, soft phonation index, presence of noise at high frequencies in WB, replacement of harmonics by noise at high frequencies and all spectrogram in NB.
Conclusion
The lower the f0, the greater the darkening tracing spectrographic, definition and number of harmonics, the higher the VRQOL related to voice. The perceptual-auditory and acoustic analysis showed significant correlations for the presence of aperiodic energy and instability of vocal signal. The perceptual-auditory, acoustic and VRQOL assessments were complementary in vocal characterization of teachers.
Keywords
Voice disorders; Faculty; Voice quality; Quality of life; Voice