Age-Related Changes in the Human Voice

Age-related changes in the human voice are explained based on longitudinal and cross-sectional investigations, for selected acoustic features pertinent to the glottal flow: fundamental frequency, fluctuations in the period and peak amplitude, vocal noise, and spectral characteristics. The quantitative data are primarily based on the acoustic analysis of the longitudinal database, in which the vowel utterances were traced over the period 10–24 years of age for 29 male and 59 female subjects with no laryngeal diseases. It is shown that statistically significant tendencies of the changes with advancing age are evident and gender-dependent in most of the features considered, but that a speaker-dependent characteristic also exists, even within the same gender, and should not be overlooked.