Whispered Voice Audiometry: I. Spectrographic Studies of Single Sounds and of Test Words

Abstract

Using a sound spectrograph, an analysis was made of whispered single voiced sounds, and of whispered Finnish speech test words. It was found that the whispered voice has a clearly greater emphasis on the higher frequencies as compared with the spoken voice, and the fricative s and the plosives have become the most intense elements. The vowels and vowel-like sounds generally are clearly below the intensity level of these consonants, although in spoken words the plosives were below the level of the vowels. Because of these differences, the second part of the study will deal with the clinical results obtained by comparative tests with spoken and whispered voice audiometry.