Spectrographic Acoustic Vocal Characteristics of Elderly Women Engaged in Aerobics

Summary Objectives This study was carried out to characterize the voice of the elderly women engaged in aerobics through spectrographic analysis. Methods The vocal emission /a:/ of 58 elderly women engaged in aerobics for the spectrographic analysis of broadband (BBS) and narrowband (NBS) was collected, through the Real-Time Spectrogram of KayPENTAX program, that provides information about the glottal source, the position of the vocal tract and the characteristics of vowels and consonants. ANOVA ( Análise de Variância ) test was used for associations and Pearson correlation test with a significance level of 5%. Results To the BBS, the elderly women had medium intensity of the tracing color of the formants ( Fs ), low presence of noise, and medium definition of F 1 and F 2. There was a medium defining F 3 and F 4 and regularity for age 60 years, medium definition F 4 and high regularity of the tracing for 70 years, and medium definition of F 3 and F 4 and regularity of the tracing for 80 years. For the NBS, the elderly women had medium intensity of tracing color, little presence of noise, harmonic substitutions by noise and subharmonic; 60 and 80 years had medium definition of harmonics and regularity of tracing and high definition; and regular for 70 years. For 70 and 80 years, there was a presence of harmonics and medium presence for 60 years. There was a negative correlation between F 2 and the group of 60 years and F 3 with the general age. Conclusions Even with myofunctional, structural, and functional changes of the larynx caused by advancing age, which may affect the vocal characteristics, the elderly women of this study showed few changes in tracing spectrogram.