On the Correlation between Perceptual and Contextual Aspects of Laughter

We have analyzed over 13000 bouts of laughter, in over 65 hours of unscripted, naturally occurring multi-party meetings, to identify discriminative contexts of voiced and unvoiced laughter. Our results show that, in meetings, laughter is quite frequent, accounting for almost 10% of all vocal activity effort by time. Approximately a third of all laughter is unvoiced, but meeting participants vary extensively in how often they employ voicing during laughter. In spite of this variability, laughter appears to exhibit robust temporal characteristics. Voiced laughs are on average longer than unvoiced laughs, and appear to correlate with temporally adjacent voiced laughter from other participants, as well as with speech from the laugher. Unvoiced laughter appears to occur independently of vocal activity from other participants.