Speech Adjustments for Room Acoustics and Their Effects on Vocal Effort.
Pasquale Bottalico
PMID 28029555WHAT IT FOUND
People spoke longer in more reverberant rooms, but at a lower pitch.
Loud speech raised pitch and voicing time, and both rose across tasks. Sound level change was the strongest predictor of reported vocal effort.
Key findings
01Talkers accumulated more phonation time in the reverberant room than in the anechoic or semi-reverberant rooms.
02Mean fundamental frequency was lower in the reverberant room than in the semi-reverberant and anechoic rooms.
03Self-reported vocal effort was associated with higher sound level change and higher pitch, and with lower sound-level variability; sound level change was the strongest predictor.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only 20 young, healthy students with self-reported normal speech and hearing, so it does not show how people with voice disorders respond. The rooms and tasks were laboratory conditions, including artificial babble and acrylic panels, not typical classrooms or work settings. Vocal fatigue was estimated from chronological task order, and the authors note that quantifying vocal fatigue remains an open research topic. The effort prediction model accounted for 32% of the differences in reported effort, so many other factors are not captured. The clinical example is based on model predictions from healthy talkers, not on a trial of treatment.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that lowering pitch or avoiding reverberation will reduce vocal effort in patients. The study measured associations in healthy students during laboratory tasks, not a treatment trial.