Summary
Fatigue following sleep deprivation adversely affects various aspects of human performance.
It also induces recognizable voice changes, but the literature is inconsistent regarding
their nature. The current study used acoustical analyses to assess the effect of 24
hours of sleep deprivation on vocal parameters of young adults. Forty-seven participants
(23 females and 24 males) were tested after nocturnal sleep and after 24 hours of
sleep deprivation. Different voice samples were recorded (sustained phonation, words,
and sentences) and analyzed for fundamental frequency (F0, in Hz), vocal intensity (in dB), harmonic-noise ratio (HNR, in dB), jitter, and
shimmer (in %). The main finding was significantly higher HNR values following sleep
deprivation than nocturnal sleep for females, across all voice samples. The HNR is
a measure of the degree of acoustic periodicity, or the amount of noise compared to
the harmonic quality present in the voice. As its values are higher, the voice quality
is perceptually better. The current results indicate that females had a significantly
higher ratio of vocal harmonics compared to vocal noise when they were sleep deprived.
In contrast, following nocturnal sleep, the ratio of vocal harmonics compared to vocal
noise was lower, which means the voice quality was poorer. This may explain the common
perceptual impressions of decreased voice quality after sleep, which may be more pronounced
in females.
Key Words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: December 04, 2018
Accepted:
November 15,
2018
Footnotes
Funding: Research reported in this publication was supported by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Medical Corps and Directorate of Defense Research & Development, Israeli Ministry of Defense (IMOD DDR&D, Grant No. RA1500000862).
Identification
Copyright
© 2018 The Voice Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
