Vocal Changes of Men and Women from Different Age Decades: An Analysis from 30 Years of Age

To verify the modifications in auditory-perceptual and acoustic parameters of the fundamental frequency, short-term perturbation, noise, and cepstral measures of voice in young and elderly were distributed over the age of decades.

The study was conducted on 265 subjects (140 females and 125 males), aged 30 to 79 years, without a history of vocal complaints or dysphonia, distributed in five age groups for females and males (30-39 years until 70-79 years). Three speech therapists voice specialists performed the perceptual-auditory analysis using a 100-mm visual analog scale, based on the overall dysphonia grade (overall grade), roughness, and breathiness from the sustained vowel /a/. The smoothed cepstral peak prominence (CPPS), average fundamental frequency (F₀), standard deviation of the fundamental frequency (std-F₀), jitter percentage (%), shimmer percentage (%), noise-to-harmonic ratio (NHR), voice turbulence index (VTI), and soft phonation index (SPI) were extracted for the acoustic analysis RESULTS: In the case of the auditory-perceptual characteristics, the comparison between aged groups showed that, in men, the vocal quality did not show significant differences in the overall grade, roughness, and breathiness. However, women in the 3rd decade of life presented higher breathiness than those in the 5th, 6th, and 7th decades. Men had a higher overall grade and roughness than women. In the case of the acoustic data, the cepstral measure showed that in the 3rd decade, men presented higher CPPS than females. The noise measures, in the comparison by age groups, only VTI and SPI were different for women: VTI was higher in the 7th decade than in the 4th, whereas SPI was higher in the 4th decade than in older women. In the male population, the SPI in the 4th decade was also higher than that in the older population CONCLUSION: The analysis by age groups of life allowed the identification of breathiness as a sensitive parameter in the different stages of adult life in women. The CPPS analysis showed that the 7th age decade is the period of the appearance of vocal changes for females, characterized by higher CPPS. The results related to traditional short-term perturbation and noise measurements showed that changes in F₀, jitter, shimmer, and NHR were not found. Among the other noise measurements, VTI and SPI demonstrated some changes in different decades of life.