On the acoustic vicinity of (adult) crying and (song-like) laughing

Belin et al. [3] noticed in their database of emotional vocalisations an acoustic similarity between the samples portraying the categories "sad" (realised as crying) and "happy" (realised as laughing). This observation is in line with anecdotal evidence of many people who felt unsure whether somebody was crying or laughing when visual and other context information was missing. This is a situation which is highly irritating given the fact that crying is usually associated with negative feelings, and laughing often with positive emotions. This study has two aims: i) a comparison of selected acoustic parameters in the samples of crying and laughing in the above mentioned database [3], ii) the manipulation of cries in order to elicitate the impression of laughter.