Cross-Cultural Adaptation and Validation of the Evaluation of the Ability to Sing Easily (EASE) for Kannada-Speaking Carnatic Classical Singers

Abstract

Objective: The present study aimed to cross-culturally adapt and validate the Evaluation of the Ability to Sing Easily (EASE) into Kannada for the benefit of Carnatic classical singers.

Methods: Following a standard translation procedure, the original English version was translated to develop a prefinal EASE-K version. This was further field-tested on 12 Carnatic singers to obtain the final EASE-K version. Upon validating the same on 104 Carnatic singers, intercorrelation between EASE-K subscales- Vocal Fatigue (VF) and Pathologic Risk Indicators (PRI) were assessed using the Spearman correlation coefficient. The internal consistency of the subscales was obtained based on the Cronbach's alpha coefficient. Nonparametric tests were carried out to study the effect of age and gender on EASE-K subscales. Further, the raw scores of the English version were compared to the EASE-K.

Results: Spearman correlation coefficient indicated a statistically significant positive correlation (P < .01) between the two subscales (r = .745). Each scale showed good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha was .84). Test-retest reliability carried on 12 singers indicated an excellent reliability for the subscales. Nonparametric tests indicated no significant effect of age and gender on the subscales of EASE-K (P > .05). Comparison across the original and EASE-K revealed significant differences for both VF (P = .02) and PRI (P = .00) subscales.

Conclusions: Current findings indicate that EASE-K is a reliable and valid tool that can be used to document the subtle changes in voice in healthy Carnatic classical singers. Further, the current tool can be used to study the effect of vocal loading across different singing styles.

Keywords: Carnatic singing; EASE; Professional voice users; Self-perceptual assessment tools; Singers.