Determining Vocal Risk for Male Cheerleaders
Open Access
- Author:
- Marrella, Ashleigh Nicole
- Area of Honors:
- Communication Sciences and Disorders
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Robert Anthony Prosek, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Ingrid Maria Blood, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Cheerleading
vocal risk - Abstract:
- While there has been research on the vocal quality and female cheerleaders dating back to the mid 1960's, there has not been any research completed on male cheerleaders. It has been noted by Andrews and Shank (1983), that "prolonged or strenuous use of the voice when excessive tension is present may predispose cheerleaders to a higher incidence of vocal problems". Because only female participants were used in those experiments, and all of the others, we will use male subjects to determine if the experiment yields similar results. The vocal mechanism for males and females are different, in that the male's vocal folds are longer, more massive, and have a greater extent of glottal closer. There may be a difference then in how males' vocal folds react to vocal strain, especially after yelling and screaming at a cheerleading event. A review of the literature reveals that female cheerleaders and their voices have been studied, however, there is no past research on male participants. Records show that there are differences in voice quality after an event for female cheerleaders. Therefore, this Thesis researched and analyzed Penn State Varsity male cheerleaders and their voices before and after a cheerleading event to see if there are differences in voice quality. The results show that there were significant differences in fundamental frequency before and after a cheering event. However, no significant differences were found for intensity, mean autocorrelation, harmonics- to-noise ratio, jitter, or shimmer.