Investigating voice characteristics of pediatric Hifz participants
Krishna Yeshoda, Muhammed SwalihAbstract
Purpose:
The voices of adult professional voice users, such as imams, have been studied in the literature. However, there is a dearth of studies on the voice of pediatric professional voice users. Specific to pediatric Hifz participants, there are no studies examining the voice characteristics of pediatric Hifz participants. We used standard group comparison research to fill this study gap.
Materials and Methods:
Praat and Dr. Speech software tools were used to analyze and extract a selected set of acoustic, aerodynamic, and voice quality measures, respectively, from phonation and reading samples of 40 children ranging in age between 10 and 11 years. The participants were grouped into two groups as Group 1 (20 Hifz participants) and Group 2 (20 non-Hifz participants). Moreover, the extracted parameters were compared across the groups.
Results:
Acoustic analysis showed a significant increase only in the average intensity for Hifz participants. All other parameters except shimmer were less deviant in Hifz participants than in non-Hifz participants. Voice quality analysis result revealed that the combined (overall) graph for all voice quality measures showed most Hifz participants to be under “no deviancy” or “mild deviancy” categories. Harshness was significantly deviant in the non-Hifz group compared with the Hifz group. Among the aerodynamic parameters, mean maximum phonation duration values were higher in Hifz participants than in non-Hifz participants. A nearly equal number of participants in both Hifz and non-Hifz participants had a
Conclusions:
The overall acoustic and voice quality measures were better for the Hifz participants, indicating a beneficial effect of the Hifz training program on the voice of Group 1 participants. These results further indicated that the non-Hifz participants could have had a higher prevalence of indulging in vocal abusive behaviors at home and schools. In contrast, children enrolled in the Hifz program might have refrained from indulging in loud talking and other vocally abusive behaviors due to their regular training and practice. However, strengthening of these preliminary findings by replicating such studies on larger samples and including more tasks and additional acoustic, aerodynamic, and invasive measures will further generalize such findings.