No abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of telepractice in the care of voice disorders. Acoustic analyses are routinely conducted for determining the presence and severity of voice disorders. In the in-person voice evaluation, the recording environment is carefully controlled as the recording's quality can affect the acoustic analyses' output. Telepractice environment does not allow such control, challenging this aspect of voice evaluation. In order to capture the nature of this challenge, this study examined the feasibility of using remotely collected voice recordings for the acoustic evaluation of disordered voice. Thirteen students in Vocal Performance and Theater studies were trained to perform individuals with voice disorders as standardized patients (SPs) and underwent a remote voice evaluation. Recordings of sustained vowels and sentences were collected via Zoom and the SP's personal computers. The fundamental frequency, cepstral peak prominence, and harmonic-to-noise ratio were calculated from these recordings. A listening experiment was also conducted to examine the perceptual similarity between the Zoom and computer recordings. The preliminary data analyses indicated that the mode of voice recording significantly affects the listener's perception and acoustic analyses of dysphonic voice. Clinical implications and possible strategies for future studies will be discussed.