Acoustic Features of Four Types of Laughter in Natural Conversational Speech

This paper presents the results of an analysis of the representative sounds of human laughter from a large corpus of naturally-occurring conversational speech. Two contrasting manners of laughter were categorized for the study: polite formal laughs and sincere mirthful laughs, and a formant analysis was performed on four phonetic classes of laugh therein. Laughing speech was also common in the corpus but is not addressed in this work. Statistical analysis of the acoustic features of each laugh was performed, and formant parameters ware compared for each call type within a laughter bout. The paper details the formant characteristics and shows how polite laughter can be distinguished from sincere laughter on this basis using a trained statistical recogniser.