Singing voice: acoustic parameters after vocal warm-up and cool-down

Mezzedimi, Chiara; Spinosi, Maria Carla; Massaro, Tommaso; Ferretti, Fabio; Cambi, Jacopo

doi:10.1080/14015439.2018.1545865

Cited by 10 publications

(11 citation statements)

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“…In the present study, the voice tasks were not considered to be fatiguing or loading for healthy subjects. For a warm-up effect, the direction of acoustic changes (eg, in HNR) observed in the present study differed from those reported in the studies investigating vocal warmup, 67 and PPE has not been reported to react to vocal warm-up treatments. 68 Thus, vocal warm-up alone does not explain the observed changes in this study.…”

Section: Methodological Considerations and Recommendations For Further Studiescontrasting

confidence: 99%

The Efficacy of the NHS Waterpipe in Superficial Hydration for People With Healthy Voices: Effects on Acoustic Voice Quality, Phonation Threshold Pressure and Subjective Sensations

et al. 2024

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This study examined the efficacy of the NHS waterpipe as a superficial hydration treatment in voice production in healthy young women. Study Design. This is a prospective, single-blind, within-and between-subject experimental design. Methods. Thirty six female university students (mean age 24.6 years, range 19−45 years) were recruited to the study. Participants were randomized to two experimental groups (E1 and E2) and a control group. E1 underwent hydration treatment with the NHS waterpipe filled with 0.9% saline that was immersed in a cup of heated water. E2 underwent a similar treatment but without heated immersion. The control group received no treatment. Acoustic Voice Quality Index (AVQI v03.01) and its subparameters, phonation threshold pressure, self-perceived phonatory effort and sensation of throat dryness was measured at three time points (before the intervention and immediately and 15 minutes after it).Results. The Tilt of the AVQI's subparameters increased significantly in the E1 (P = 0.027) and E2 groups (P = 0.027) after the intervention. Furthermore, the E1 group had significantly lower harmonics-to-noise-ratio values at the third measurement point compared to the E2 group (P = 0.023). These findings may result from fluid transported to the vocal fold level. The sensations of throat dryness decreased in the E1 (P = 0.001) and E2 groups (P < 0.0005) after the intervention. Perceived phonatory effort decreased statistically significantly at the final measurement point in the E1 (P = 0.002) and E2 (P = 0.031) groups. No variables changed in the control group. Conclusions. The waterpipe seems to be efficient in hydrating vocal folds on single use. It seems to be more efficient when employed with a hot water bath, albeit slightly impairing some acoustic values in the short term. Without the heated fluid, it still seems to decrease sensations of throat dryness and affect acoustic voice quality. The waterpipe does not seem to have an effect on phonation threshold pressure, and it seems to lower self-perceived effort just as efficiently whether the waterpipe is employed using a hot water bath or not. Further research is needed to prove the efficacy of long-term usage and usage with voice patients.

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Section: Methodological Considerations and Recommendations For Further Studiescontrasting

confidence: 99%

The Efficacy of the NHS Waterpipe in Superficial Hydration for People With Healthy Voices: Effects on Acoustic Voice Quality, Phonation Threshold Pressure and Subjective Sensations

et al. 2024

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“…Although Ragan (2016) found objective measures inconclusive, singers' perceptions were that a cool-down regime reduced vocal fatigue and felt the psychological implications of this positive response should not be underestimated. Mezzedimi et al (2020) found that the F0 of female singing students reduced following a cooldown session, confirming a positive effect in aiding voice recovery and reducing vocal fold tension. Smith (2018) believed that vocal warm-ups and cooldowns preserve vocal health and that omitting them may risk injury to the voice.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 67%

“…Mezzedimi et al. (2020) found that the F0 of female singing students reduced following a cool‐down session, confirming a positive effect in aiding voice recovery and reducing vocal fold tension.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

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Amateur choir singers – Does good vocal health matter?

Levett

Pring

2023

Intl J Lang & Comm Disor

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Background: Many amateur singers enjoy singing in choirs. They are likely to lack the training and expertise of professional singers and this may have an impact on their vocal health. Aims:To assess the experiences of amateur singers, their use of warm-up and cool-down sessions, their vocal health, their sources of help and advice and their reactions to receiving a diagnosis and treatment. Methods and Procedures: A questionnaire was sent to amateur choir singers.Quantitative data on their use of warm-up and cool-down activities were collected and the singers rated how frequently they experienced adverse voice symptoms after singing. Qualitative data were collected from singers who had sought advice about their voice and from those who had received a diagnosis and treatment.Outcome and Results: Most choirs used warm-up sessions but few used cooldown. Singers who participated in choir warm-ups experienced significantly less vocal symptoms. Individual warm-ups were ineffective. Singers who had previously had a diagnosis continued to have significantly higher symptom scores. A quarter of the singers who had neither sought help nor had a diagnosis had high scores. Singers appeared uncertain about who to consult for help. Those who saw a speech and language therapist were much more likely to receive a diagnosis and treatment either by the therapist or by referral to an ear, nose and throat specialist. Those receiving treatment were mainly positive about it and likely to complete a course of therapy. Conclusions and Implications: Warm-up sessions performed by choirs are helpful in avoiding voice symptoms and are recommended. The presence of singers who are unaware of potential damage to their voices is a concern. A simple rating system, as used in this research, may act to alert them to the dangers.Choir leaders could be more active in advising singers and refer them to professionals where necessary. Speech and language therapists appear more sensitive to their problems and could be a first point of contact.

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“…Analysis using the NUS-48E showed that sung speech jitter and shimmer ranges are lower, and HNR is higher than in spoken speech. Among the factors that may explain these variations are vocal tract muscles "warm-up" during singing [23], interactions between jitter, shimmer and the degree of vibrato [24] and, the correlation between these parameters and the fundamental frequency, i.e., jitter will decrease at higher frequencies. The voice quality parameters ranges showed a clear gender distinction in spoken speech.…”

Section: Sung Speech Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

The use of Voice Source Features for Sung Speech Recognition

Dabike

Barker

2021

ICASSP 2021 - 2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

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In this paper, we ask whether vocal source features (pitch, shimmer, jitter, etc) can improve the performance of automatic sung speech recognition, arguing that conclusions previously drawn from spoken speech studies may not be valid in the sung speech domain. We first use a parallel singing/speaking corpus (NUS-48E) to illustrate differences in sung vs spoken voicing characteristics including pitch range, syllables duration, vibrato, jitter and shimmer. We then use this analysis to inform speech recognition experiments on the sung speech DSing corpus, using a state of the art acoustic model and augmenting conventional features with various voice source parameters. Experiments are run with three standard (increasingly large) training sets, DSing1 (15.1 hours), DSing3 (44.7 hours) and DS-ing30 (149.1 hours). Pitch combined with degree of voicing produces a significant decrease in WER from 38.1% to 36.7% when training with DSing1 however smaller decreases in WER observed when training with the larger more varied DSing3 and DSing30 sets were not seen to be statistically significant. Voicing quality characteristics did not improve recognition performance although analysis suggests that they do contribute to an improved discrimination between voiced/unvoiced phoneme pairs.

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Singing voice: acoustic parameters after vocal warm-up and cool-down

Cited by 10 publications

References 41 publications

The Efficacy of the NHS Waterpipe in Superficial Hydration for People With Healthy Voices: Effects on Acoustic Voice Quality, Phonation Threshold Pressure and Subjective Sensations

The Efficacy of the NHS Waterpipe in Superficial Hydration for People With Healthy Voices: Effects on Acoustic Voice Quality, Phonation Threshold Pressure and Subjective Sensations

Amateur choir singers – Does good vocal health matter?

The use of Voice Source Features for Sung Speech Recognition

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