Comparison of effects of finger kazoo and tube phonation techniques in women with normal voice

Purpose  To compare the voice before and after the finger kazoo and phonation into a glass tube immersed in water in women without vocal complaints or laryngeal affections.

Methods  Forty-six women participated of the group that performed the finger kazoo and 12 of the group performed the phonation into a glass tube immersed in water. It was collected the vowel /a:/, before and after the techniques, for acoustic analysis through the Multi-Dimensional Voice Program Advanced and the Real Time Spectrogram; and auditory perceptual with RASATI scale. The techniques were performed on three series of the 15 repetitions, with 30 seconds of rest between them.

Results  In comparison, phonation into a glass tube immersed in water showed significant improvement: definition of the first formant, subharmonic presence, smoothed pitch perturbation, variation of f0 and voice turbulence index; and the finger kazoo showed a significant reduction in the standard deviation of f0. The auditory perceptual analysis had no significant difference between groups.

Conclusion  In comparison, phonation into a glass tube immersed in water provided more noticeable improvement in acoustic vocal aspects related to resonance, noise and stability than the finger kazoo.

Voice; Voice quality; Voice training; Larynx; Speech acoustic