Development and preliminary validation of the EASE: a tool to measure perceived singing voice function

Area of Science:

• Vocal health research
• Psychometrics
• Singing voice assessment

Background:

• Existing voice self-rating tools are disease-specific and unsuitable for healthy singers.
• A need exists for a tool sensitive to subtle changes in a singer's voice and vocal mechanism due to load.
• This study aimed to develop and validate a scale for singers' perceptions of their current singing voice status.

Purpose of the Study:

• To devise and validate a scale to assess singers' perceptions of their current singing voice status.
• To create a tool sensitive to the nuances of a singer's voice and physical changes related to vocal load.

Main Methods:

• Collected 95 vocal health descriptors from singer focus groups.
• Reduced descriptors to 42 items via consensus with 25 music theater (MT) singers.
• Administered a 42-item survey to 284 professional MT singers online for voice status perception evaluation.

Main Results:

• Principal component analysis yielded two item subsets.
• Rasch analysis refined these into two 10-item subscales with good fit and reliability.
• Combined subscales formed a single 20-item scale with strong psychometric properties, showing no differential item functioning by sex or age.

Conclusions:

• The Evaluation of the Ability to Sing Easily (EASE) is a concise clinical tool for assessing singers' voice status perceptions.
• EASE demonstrates good measurement properties and may track vocal load effects.
• This scale can potentially screen singers at risk for voice disorders.