Mark L. Berardi

Effects of voice-sparing cricotracheal resection on phonation in women.

Individuals with idiopathic subglottic stenosis (SGS) are at risk for voice disorders prior to and following surgical management. This study examined the nature and severity of voice disorders in patients with SGS before and after a revised cricotracheal resection (CTR) procedure designed to minimize adverse effects on voice function.

Spectral-normalization filter for subjective analysis of the aging voice

Voice quality changes with age. One way of identifying voice quality changes and the possible physiological degeneration related to vocal function is through perceptually estimating talker age and then correlating estimated talker age with acoustical analysis. The most common perceptual studies investigating estimated talker age are cross-sectional. While these studies are useful, longitudinal studies provide additional details in the progressive degeneration of a single speaker’s (or group of speakers’) voice quality. Nevertheless, one limitation of longitudinal studies is that perceptual ratings of voice quality or talker age could be biased by recording quality (e.g., the spectral qualities of recordings from earlier decades are limited by the technology used). In this paper, a spectral-normalization filter was developed and applied to a corpus of recordings from an individual spanning about 50 years (1959–2007). The filter was shown to be effective in normalizing the autospectra of the recordings. The...

Voice production effects due to extreme reverberation times in real rooms

Public school teachers have a heightened risk of voice problems. There are many potential causes of this increased vocal risk, including poor room acoustics (e.g., excessively high or low reverberation times). With increased understanding, rooms could be better designed to maintain communication transfer (intelligibility), while mitigating unhealthy vocal effort and, by extension, voice problems. The present study quantified the influence of a wide range of reverberation times (RT20) on vocal production parameters. Thirty-two participants were recorded completing a battery of speech tasks in eight widely ranging conditions within a reverberation chamber. Changes in RT20 had highly correlated effects on several vocal parameters, including smoothed cepstral peak prominence, acoustic vocal quality index (AVQI), and pitch strength. As RT20 increased, vocal parameters tended toward values commonly associated with dysphonic phonation. Additionally, results were gender dependent, with females tending to produce ...

Acoustics for the Deaf: Can You See Me Now?

Although acoustics examples and demonstrations can be an effective tool for engaging students in introductory physics classes and outreach, teaching principles of sound and vibration to the deaf and hard of hearing needs to be approached carefully. The deaf and hard of hearing have less intuition with sound but are no strangers to some of the effects of pressure, vibrations, and other basic principles that are related to sound. We recently expanded our “Sounds to Astound” outreach program and developed an acoustics demonstration program for 80 visiting deaf students mostly between the ages of 13 and 18. Both this experience, which had a “See and Feel” approach, similar to what was proposed by Lang, and a specialized planetarium program helped reinforce for the students the opportunities that exist for them in higher education. This paper describes some of the pedagogical underpinnings, the demonstrations, their implementation and lessons learned, and student responses.

The sound of STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math): Acoustics as the bridge between arts and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math)

This paper describes the development and presentation of a Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math (STEAM) workshop for elementary school teachers designed to provide ideas and tools for using acoustics in the classroom. The abundant hands-on activities and concepts in acoustics naturally link science and music in an intuitive way that can assist teachers in moving forward on the STEAM initiative. Our workshop gave teachers an introduction to acoustics principles and demonstrations that can be used to tie STEAM techniques in with Utah State Education Core standards. These hands-on demonstrations and real-world applications provide an avenue to engage students and support learning outcomes. Feedback indicated that the participants learned from and enjoyed the initial implementation of this workshop, though many elementary school teachers did not immediately see how they could integrate it into their curriculum. While additional efforts might be made to better focus the training workshop for the K-...

The sound of STEAM: Acoustics as the bridge between the arts and STEM

This paper describes the development and presentation of a Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math (STEAM) workshop for elementary school teachers designed to provide ideas and tools for using acoustics in the classroom. The abundant hands-on activities and concepts in acoustics naturally link science and music in an intuitive way that can assist teachers in moving forward on the STEAM initiative. Our workshop gave teachers an introduction to acoustics principles and demonstrations that can be used to tie in STEAM techniques with Utah State Education Core standards. These hands-on demonstrations and real-world applications provide an avenue to engage students and support learning outcomes. Feedback indicated that the participants learned from and enjoyed the initial implementation of this workshop, though many elementary school teachers did not immediately see how they could integrate it into their curriculum. While additional efforts might be made to better focus the training workshop for the K-...

Development of an acoustics outreach program for the deaf

The Hear and See methodology (Groppe, 2011) has often been used as ameans of enhancing pedagogy by focusing on the two strongest learningsenses, but this naturally does not apply to deaf or hard of hearing students. Because deaf students’ prior nonaural experiences with sound will vary significantly from those of students with typical hearing, different methods must be used to build understanding. However, the sensory-focused pedagogical principle can be applied in a different way for the Deaf by utilizing the senses of touch and sight, called here the “See and Feel” method. This presentation will provide several examples of how acoustics demonstrations have been adapted to create an outreach program for a group of junior high students from a school for the Deaf and discuss challenges encountered.

@BYUAcoustics: Using social media to enhance research and outreach at BYU

Social media has become an increasingly common method of attracting the attention of fellow researchers and promoting interest in acoustics worldwide. A concerted effort has been recently made by the Acoustics Research Group at Brigham Young University to promote acoustics with various methods of enhanced communications. Web page articles were developed with lay-language introductions to the group’s research activities, which can be shared directly to social media sites. The group’s Facebook page and research Twitter account @BYUacoustics provide information about current research meetings, publications, and acoustics in the news, which help network with students who may be interested in joining the acoustics program and which keep alumni informed of current events. In addition, our outreach efforts have been augmented by use of social media. A YouTube channel has been created that contains videos of acoustical demonstration from our outreach show. A general audience Twitter account @Sounds2Astound has be...

Using the stability of vocal onsets to evaluate vocal effort in response to changing acoustical conditions

Several acoustical measures have been used in the past to evaluate vocal effort. They are useful in evaluating occupational risk for teachers or other occupational voice users. Analysis of vocal onsets has been used to show vocal effort in spasmodic dysphonia. Acoustical measures are also used in clinical speech-language pathology as an inexpensive and noninvasive ways of evaluating pathology severity and tracking therapy progress. In this presentation, a single acoustic parameter based on relative fundamental frequencies of glottal pulses following voiceless consonants (the onset coefficient) is used to evaluate vocal effort in response to changes in background noise and reverberation time within speaking environments. Analysis shows that males and females have similar vocal effort levels in the most typical acoustical conditions. However, females respond to louder background noise and longer reverberation times with more vocal effort than males.

Classroom acoustics for vocal health of elementary school teachers

School teachers have an elevated risk of voice problems due to vocal demands in the workplace. ANSI SI2.60-2002 provides a standard for classroom acoustics, but it focuses primarily on students and unoccupied classroom settings. This presentation explores a preliminary study of six elementary school teachers that included measurements of architectural acoustics parameters and noise-levels of their classrooms, as well as their speech levels and fundamental frequencies over the course of a school day. The measurement methods and speech trends are discussed for the various cases, demonstrating that classroom acoustics standards may benefit from greater attention to teacher vocal health.