Abstract Purpose: Humming, a voice facilitation technique enlisted for soft, symmetrical contact of the vocal fold during voice production, may well be used for warm-up and or cool-down in regular voice users. The study aimed to investigate the effect of humming on vocal fold contact during phonation (humming, normal, and loud) using electroglottography (EGG) parameters in young phononormic individuals. Materials and Methods: Thirty students aged between 18 and 25 years formed two groups of participants as males and females. They were screened for normalcy of voice using consensus auditory-perceptual evaluation of voice before inclusion and completed three phonation tasks (normal phonation, loud phonation, and humming). EGG model 6103 of the Computerized Speech Lab 4500 (Kay Elemetrics, Lincoln Park, NJ, USA) was used to record and extract parameters. Results: In general, most EGG parameters showed significant differences across the groups except minimum F0. Significant differences were absent for males in humming and normal phonation. The median open quotient value was greater for females in all three tasks, contact quotient of normal and humming phonation for males was greater. Humming and loud phonation showed significant differences across gender, but in normal phonation, significance was noted only in a few parameters, namely, speed quotient, mean fundamental frequency, maximum fundamental frequency, and standard deviation of fundamental frequency. Conclusion: There exist changes in vocal fold adduction mechanism across different phonations, as shown evidently in some of the EGG parameters. Significance for EGG parameters between loud phonation and humming confirms that these tasks are useful to investigate vocal fold contact in dysphonic individuals as a posttherapeutic outcome measure.
Shaw et al. (Tue,) studied this question.