Voice Disorders Health Article

Definition

A voice disorder is an abnormality of one or more of the three characteristics of voice: pitch, intensity (loudness), and quality (resonance).

Description

The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders estimates that approximately7.5 million persons in the United States suffer from some sort of voice disorder. The negative impact of a voice disorder is often social, psychological, professional, and economic (as in the case of a singer or actor).

Voice is typically described in terms of three characteristics: pitch, intensity, and quality. Pitch may be described as the relative tone of a person's voice—how high or low it is, how monotonous, or how it demonstrates repeated inappropriate pitch patterns. A disorder may result from pitch being inappropriate for an individual's age and gender. An inability to perceive pitch and pitch patterns may result in a monotonous voice, a high-pitched voice, or inappropriate use of repeated pitch patterns.

Loudness describes the volume or intensity of a person's voice. A person who spends a great deal of time in a noisy location or who is suffering from hearing loss may speak with high intensity, or louder than normal. A soft or inaudible voice may be associated with a psychological condition such as shyness or with a structural defect of the vocal cords.

Some disorders of voice quality are related to how the vocal cords function: breathiness is caused by vocal cord vibration that does not have a closed phase, while hoarseness is caused by vocal cords that are closed too tightly, so they cannot vibrate properly. Other disorders are related to how the voice resonates in the oral (mouth), nasal (nose), and pharyngeal (throat) cavities. If the nasal passage becomes blocked such as with a cold, then air is unable to reach the nasal cavity and a voice sounds hyponasal. Hypernasality results when too much air passes through the nasal cavities during phonation or when there is an obstruction in the anterior nasal cavities (pinching the nostrils).