Technique for measuring the vocal penetrating capacity of the spoken voice

Language comprehension in vocal professions will depend greatly on the capacity of the voice to penetrate background noise at the place of work. For therapeutic as well as for measuring purposes we therefore use a maximal masking noise representing a frequency mixture of all vowels in combination with the voiced consonants m, n, and ng produced by 80 male and female voices. The method includes one tape recording of the actual patient's voice and two listening procedures. On the basis of extensive measurements, the conclusion can be drawn that the penetrating capacity of the voice must be considered as poor if it is below 22 dB, to be good if it is between 22 and 28 dB, and to be very good if it is above 28 dB. 450 patients and healthy test persons underwent this measurement.