The University of Texas' Voice Lab asked that very question and found a not-so-surprising answer, according to a new study published in the Journal of Voice.
Turns out Zoom augments the voice, which for many people might be just annoying if even noticed at all. For speech therapists, it means that when they're working with a person with a vocal tremor, for example, they don't know whether it's the person's voice making that sound or Zoom.
"Can you really make clinical judgments with the voice? It's distorted," said Rosemary Lester-Smith, the director of the UT Voice Lab and the lead investigator for the study.
She and her then-graduate student Greg Jebaily wanted to know what exactly Zoom was doing with sound and figure out work-arounds to help fellow speech pathologists make accurate assessments during telehealth visits.
They enlisted the help of Jeremy Gruy, a multimedia technician at UT, and David Cox, an assistant director for technology services at the Moody College of Communication, to help them figure out how to record Zoom calls accurately and compare that audio to how the person at home was actually speaking.
They had to do it in a way that would be scientifically accurate and not influenced by a microphone or an unstable internet signal or some other outside factor. They wanted to know what Zoom itself was doing to the voice.
They tested it with Gruy and Jebaily by recording them during Zoom calls. They practiced with a vocal tremor to see what Zoom would do to the pitch, loudness and rhythm of the shakiness.
Then they looked at the audio quality and compared what was recorded locally and what went through Zoom.
"We would see things," Gruy said. "Why did it do this? This is compression. Zoom is doing something. What is it doing?"
They found that Zoom was pretty accurate when it came to the pitch of the voice, but intensity and loudness were being manipulated in both a magnitude and a time-based way.
When a program changes the intensity and loudness, Lester-Smith said, it's also changing the quality of the voice. That's important if you're working with someone who has a voice disorder with a breathiness, a roughness or strain to the voice, she said.
It became clear that recording through Zoom was not the way to do an accurate vocal assessment. Instead, they came up with a way for people to use a smartphone to record themselves as if it were a tape recorder.
The patient would send in the audio for a therapist to evaluate. It has to be done asynchronously rather than relying on Zoom to provide accurate audio.
For even better quality, the UT Voice Lab now has kits of equipment with a good microphone and a good audio digital interface that plugs into a computer. They send out the kits if people don't have their own equipment and offer recording hints, such as to record in a closet to block out background noise.
They also created instructions for therapists on how to use the kits and what equipment people need.
While in-person therapy is still preferred because assessment and feedback for the patient can be done in real time, this method of accurately recording at home can be useful to see more people who live farther away or would have trouble getting to a voice therapy center like the one at UT.
"This does improve clinical accessibility a lot," Lester-Smith said. "We can continue to follow up remotely."
It also could affect future research by expanding the pool of people for studies, Lester-Smith said. People no longer would have to come to her lab.
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