A Comparative Study on the Voices of Clergymen: Ministers vs. Priests

성직자 음성의 음향학적인 비교 연구

This study compared the voices of ministers and priests. There. has been a common notion that ministers is more passionate than priests in delivering their speech. Therefore, it can be assumed that ministers abuses or misuses his/her voice compared to priests. This study attempted acoustic analysis of the voices of 6 ministers and .5 priests before and after their speech. We measured F0, jitter, shimmer, NNE and HNR using Dr. Speech (Version 4.0, Tiger DRS). A t-test was performed to determine any objective differences of their voices. The results showed that there were no significant differences in the voices of ministers and priests before and after their speech. However, there seemed to be an interesting reversed tendency between ministers and priests, although it did not reach a statistical significance. That is, P0 tended to increase after the speech in ministers, whereas it tended to decrease in priests. In addition, HNR tended to decrease after the speech in priests, while it tended to increase in ministers.