The acoustic features of human laughter
30 Aug 2001-Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Acoustical Society of America)-Vol. 110, Iss: 3, pp 1581-1597
TL;DR: Recording of naturally produced laugh bouts recorded from 97 young adults as they watched funny video clips revealed evident diversity in production modes, remarkable variability in fundamental frequency characteristics, and consistent lack of articulation effects in supralaryngeal filtering are of particular interest.
Abstract: Remarkably little is known about the acoustic features of laughter. Here, acoustic outcomes are reported for 1024 naturally produced laugh bouts recorded from 97 young adults as they watched funny video clips. Analyses focused on temporal features, production modes, source- and filter-related effects, and indexical cues to laugher sex and individual identity. Although a number of researchers have previously emphasized stereotypy in laughter, its acoustics were found now to be variable and complex. Among the variety of findings reported, evident diversity in production modes, remarkable variability in fundamental frequency characteristics, and consistent lack of articulation effects in supralaryngeal filtering are of particular interest. In addition, formant-related filtering effects were found to be disproportionately important as acoustic correlates of laugher sex and individual identity. These outcomes are examined in light of existing data concerning laugh acoustics, as well as a number of hypotheses and conjectures previously advanced about this species-typical vocal signal.
Citations
More filters
TL;DR: Modern evolutionary theory is informing more models, emphasizing that expressions are directed at a receiver, that the interests of sender and receiver can conflict, that there are many determinants of sending an expression in addition to emotion, that expressions influence the receiver in a variety of ways, and that the receiver's response is more than simply decoding a message.
Abstract: A flurry of theoretical and empirical work concerning the production of and response to facial and vocal expressions has occurred in the past decade. That emotional expressions express emotions is a tautology but may not be a fact. Debates have centered on universality, the nature of emotion, and the link between emotions and expressions. Modern evolutionary theory is informing more models, emphasizing that expressions are directed at a receiver, that the interests of sender and receiver can conflict, that there are many determinants of sending an expression in addition to emotion, that expressions influence the receiver in a variety of ways, and that the receiver's response is more than simply decoding a message.
722 citations
Cites background from "The acoustic features of human laug..."
...Although laugh acoustics are remarkably variable both within and between laughers (Grammer & Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1990, Bachorowski et al. 2001), they have not been found to vary as a function of self-reported emotion....
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25 Aug 2013
TL;DR: The INTERSPEECH 2013 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge provides for the first time a unified test-bed for Social Signals such as laughter in speech and introduces conflict in group discussions as a new task and deals with autism and its manifestations in speech.
Abstract: The INTERSPEECH 2013 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge provides for the first time a unified test-bed for Social Signals such as laughter in speech. It further introduces conflict in group discussions as a new task and deals with autism and its manifestations in speech. Finally, emotion is revisited as task, albeit with a broader range of overall twelve enacted emotional states. In this paper, we describe these four Sub-Challenges, their conditions, baselines, and a new feature set by the openSMILE toolkit, provided to the participants. Index Terms: Computational Paralinguistics, Challenge, Social Signals, Conflict, Emotion, Autism
694 citations
Cites background from "The acoustic features of human laug..."
...Laughter [17, 18, 19] can indicate amusement, joy, scorn, or embarrassment....
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TL;DR: Converging ethological, pharmacological, and brain stimulation research indicates that whereas long low-frequency USVs occur during anticipation of punishment or avoidance behavior, short, high-frequency (< 0.3-s, approximately 50-kHz) USVs typically occur during expectation of reward or approach behavior, which suggests that long 22-kHz USVs may index a state of negative activation, whereas short, 50- kHzUSVs may instead index astate of positive activation.
Abstract: Adult rats spontaneously vocalize in ultrasonic frequencies. Although these ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) have been described as by-products of locomotor activity or social signals, accumulating evidence suggests that they may also index anticipatory affective states. Converging ethological, pharmacological, and brain stimulation research indicates that whereas long low-frequency (> 0.3-s, approximately 22-kHz) USVs occur during anticipation of punishment or avoidance behavior, short, high-frequency (< 0.3-s, approximately 50-kHz) USVs typically occur during anticipation of reward or approach behavior. Thus, long 22-kHz USVs may index a state of negative activation, whereas short, 50-kHz USVs may instead index a state of positive activation. This hypothesis has theoretical implications for understanding the brain circuitry underlying mammalian affective states and clinical applicability for modeling hedonic properties of different psychotropic compounds.
579 citations
TL;DR: It is hypothesized that Duchenne laughter became fully ritualized in early hominids between 4 and 2 mya as a medium for playful emotional contagion and postulate that a generalized class of nonserious social incongruity would have been a reliable indicator of such safe times and thereby came to be a potent distal elicitor of laughter and playful emotion.
Abstract: A number of recent hypotheses have attempted to explain the ultimate evolutionary origins of laughter and humor. However, most of these have lacked breadth in their evolutionary frameworks while neglecting the empirical existence of two distinct types of laughter—Duchenne and non‐Duchenne—and the implications of this distinction for the evolution of laughter as a signal. Most of these hypotheses have also been proposed in relative isolation of each other and remain disjointed from the relevant empirical literature. Here we attempt to remedy these shortcomings through a synthesis of previous laughter and humor research followed by (i) a reevaluation of this research in light of theory and data from several relevant disciplines, and (ii) the proposal of a synthetic evolutionary framework that takes into account phylogeny and history as well as proximate mechanisms and adaptive significance. We consider laughter to have been a preadaptation that was gradually elaborated and co‐opted through both bio...
455 citations
TL;DR: This hypothesis is based on the premises that hominin mothers that attended vigilantly to infants were strongly selected for, and that such mothers had genetically based potentials for consciously modifying vocalizations and gestures to control infants, both of which receive support from the literature.
Abstract: In order to formulate hypotheses about the evolutionary underpinnings that preceded the first glimmerings of language, mother-infant gestural and vocal interactions are compared in chimpanzees and humans and used to model those of early hominins. These data, along with paleoanthropological evidence, suggest that prelinguistic vocal substrates for protolanguage that had prosodic fea- tures similar to contemporary motherese evolved as the trend for enlarging brains in late australopithecines/early Homo progressively in- creased the difficulty of parturition, thus causing a selective shift toward females that gave birth to relatively undeveloped neonates. It is hypothesized that hominin mothers adopted new foraging strategies that entailed maternal silencing, reassuring, and controlling of the behaviors of physically removed infants (i.e., that shared human babies' inability to cling to their mothers' bodies). As mothers increas- ingly used prosodic and gestural markings to encourage juveniles to behave and to follow, the meanings of certain utterances (words) be- came conventionalized. This hypothesis is based on the premises that hominin mothers that attended vigilantly to infants were strongly selected for, and that such mothers had genetically based potentials for consciously modifying vocalizations and gestures to control in- fants, both of which receive support from the literature.
359 citations
Cites background from "The acoustic features of human laug..."
...Interestingly, women produce significantly more song-like bouts of laughter than men, who produce significantly more grunt-like laughs (Bachorowski et al. 2001)....
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...Bachorowski et al. (2001) propose that laughter influences listeners through acoustic properties that affect attention, arousal, and emotional responses....
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors introduce articulatory phonetics phonology and phonetic transcription, including the Consonants of English English vowels and English words and sentences, as well as the international phonetic alphabet feature hierarchy performance exercises.
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2,835 citations
TL;DR: Analysis of the formant data shows numerous differences between the present data and those of PB, both in terms of average frequencies of F1 and F2, and the degree of overlap among adjacent vowels.
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1,891 citations
TL;DR: This review examines some difficulties engendered by a linguistically inspired, meaning-based view of primate calls, specifically that vocalizations are arbitrarily structured vehicles for transmitting encoded referential information, and suggests two ways in which acoustic structure may be tied to simple, nonlinguistic functions in primate vocalizations.
Abstract: In this review, we will examine some difficulties engendered by a linguistically inspired, meaning-based view of primate calls, specifically that vocalizations are arbitrarily structured vehicles for transmitting encoded referential information. The fundamental problem is that this characterization, while metaphorical, is often taken literally. While researchers have thus usefully been spurred to demonstrate that primates sometimes do behave as if their vocalizations are referential, this “metaphor-as-explanation” approach has also distracted them from normative biological perspectives and the structure-function relationships that likely exist in the signals. After a brief historical introduction, we consider some of the problems raised by relying on linguistically based constructs, and suggest two ways in which acoustic structure may be tied to simple, nonlinguistic functions in primate vocalizations. We then consider the evolution of these calling strategies in light of the sometimes coincident, but other times divergent interests of senders and receivers.
345 citations
TL;DR: It is suggested that a variety of nonlinear phenomena including subharmonics, biphonation, and deterministic chaos are normally occurring phonatory events in mammalian vocalizations.
Abstract: To establish a framework for discussing mammalian vocalizations, relevant terminology and concepts from the theory of nonlinear dynamics are introduced. It is suggested that a variety of nonlinear phenomena including subharmonics, biphonation, and deterministic chaos are normally occurring phonatory events. The whole spectrum of these phenomena can be found in the repertoire of the African wild dog Lycaon pictus. In addition, examples of nonlinear phenomena in a wide range of other mammalian taxa will be presented. Moreover, some artifacts in sound spectrographic analysis are listed which may be misinterpreted as nonlinear phenomena. Within the framework of nonlinear dynamics, a consistent terminology is proposed and our observations are related to laryngeal sound production mechanisms. Finally, some hypotheses concerning the communicative potential of the described phenomena are discussed.
312 citations