The purpose of this study was to investigate the feasibility of using neck-surface acceleration signals to discriminate between modal, breathy and pressed voice. Voice data for five English single vowels were collected from 31 female native Canadian English speakers using a portable Neck Surface Accelerometer (NSA) and a condenser microphone. Firstly, auditory-perceptual ratings were conducted by five clinically-certificated Speech Language Pathologists (SLPs) to categorize voice type using the audio recordings. Intra- and inter-rater analyses were used to determine the SLPs’ reliability for the perceptual categorization task. Mixed-type samples were screened out, and congruent samples were kept for the subsequent classification task. Secondly, features such as spectral harmonics, jitter, shimmer and spectral entropy were extracted from the NSA data. Supervised learning algorithms were used to map feature vectors to voice type categories. A feature wrapper strategy was used to evaluate the contribution of each feature or feature combinations to the classification between different voice types. The results showed that the highest classification accuracy on a full set was 82.5%. The breathy voice classification accuracy was notably greater (approximately 12%) than those of the other two voice types. Shimmer and spectral entropy were the best correlated metrics for the classification accuracy.

ObjectiveTo assess the duration of clinical response after in‐office vocal fold steroid injection (VFSI) for vocal fold (VF) scar.MethodsDemographic and clinical data for in‐office VFSI occurring from 2017 to 2020 were collected. Two Speech‐Language Pathologists (SLPs) used perceptual evaluation of voice and functional scales to evaluate blinded voice and laryngovideostroboscopy (LVS) samples collected pre‐ and post‐injection across multiple timepoints.ResultsBlinded SLP ratings were used for 30 individual VFs undergoing initial injection in 18 patients. Persistent improvement in voice past 6 months was seen in 57% of patients after VFSI. Multiple measures of voice and amplitude, percent vibrating tissue, and closed phase predominance significantly improved at various follow‐up timepoints on average.ConclusionAccounting for patient heterogeneity and disease progression, in‐office VFSI for VF scar is associated with sustained improvement in a subset of patients. Approximately half of patients can expect to experience a lasting improvement in voice. Future studies of larger scale are required to identify patient factors associated with long‐term benefit.Level of Evidence4 Laryngoscope, 133:2333–2339, 2023

Sex-related differences in the effects of noise on humans have been reported in several areas including physiological reactions, sleep disturbance, and permanent hearing threshold shift. It has been suggested that economic, social, and cultural factors may combine to reduce the opportunity for women to be exposed to high-level occupational and recreational noises. However, this contaminant is absent from research into noise-induced temporary threshold shift (TTS), because the noise exposures are carefully controlled in the laboratory performance of TTS studies. Most research into sex-related differences in temporary, auditory noise-exposure effects have been limited to the examination of threshold phenomena only. In the present study, a variety of noise-induced hearing changes have been examined. Subjects were tested before and after a one-half hour noise exposure using an audiometric test battery that included measures of pure-tone threshold, loudness discrimination, tone-on-tone masking, and loudness and pitch measuring of tinnitus. Data were examined for sex-related differences in the magnitude and incidence of noise-induced shifts in these auditory tasks. Implications of these findings for hearing conservation and for modeling noise effects are discussed.