Background & Objective: Voice disorders impact approximately 7-8% of American adults, affecting vocal quality, pitch, and loudness. The Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice (CAPE-V) is a widely used clinical tool designed to assess vocal characteristics through auditory-perceptual judgments. Developed from a consensus meeting led by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), CAPE-V aims to standardize the evaluation of vocal impairments across clinical and research settings and evaluates six vocal parameters: roughness, breathiness, strain, pitch, loudness, and overall severity. This review covers the advantages and disadvantages of CAPE-V, focusing on its reliability and use in various studies on vocal quality, along with recommendations for best practices when using CAPE-V.

Methods: Keywords such as “CAPE-V” and “consensus auditory-perceptual evaluation of voice,” were used to search Scopus, Google Scholar, PubMed, and Web of Science to retrieve papers that were relevant to this review. These papers were subsequently analyzed to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of CAPE-V, along with any recommendations for best practices.

Results: This review has found many advantages of CAPE-V, including its broad applicability across vocal pathologies and ability to allow clinicians to obtain comprehensive information regarding an individual’s vocal characteristics. Furthermore, CAPE-V only requires basic literary skills, giving it the potential to be used with both children and adults. In addition, CAPE-V has been shown to have better rater reliability compared to the GRBAS scale, another popular perceptual vocal quality evaluation method. Despite these benefits, CAPE-V has also been found to have some limitations, including its subjective nature, inherent reliance on clinician expertise, and inability to be used as a diagnostic tool for a vocal pathology.

Conclusion: Overall, this review has found that CAPE-V is a robust instrument for auditory-perceptual voice evaluation, providing valuable information for assessing vocal quality impairments and facilitating more informed clinical decisions regarding treatment and further testing. This review effectively analyzes the existing literature on CAPE-V and recommends best practices for using CAPE-V in studies on vocal quality in the future.