Who laughs? A moment of laughter in Shortbus

In his essay On Laughter, first published in France in 1900, Henri Bergson suggested that “our laughter is always the laughter of the group” (2003:5). With this observation in mind, I have to ask: who laughs when we watch a movie? Who is it that we hear when laughter fills the theatre even if momentarily

On the acoustics of overlapping laughter in conversational speech

The social nature of laughter invites people to laugh together. This joint vocal action often results in overlapping laughter. In this paper, we show that the acoustics of overlapping laughs are different from non-overlapping laughs. We found that overlapping laughs are stronger prosodically marked than non-overlapping ones, in terms of higher values for duration, mean F0, mean and maximum intensity, and the amount of voicing. This effect is intensified by the number of people joining in the laughter event, which suggests that entrainment is at work. We also found that group size affects the number of overlapping laughs which illustrates the contagious nature of laughter. Finally, people appear to join laughter simultaneously at a delay of approximately 500 ms; a delay that must be considered when developing spoken dialogue systems that are able to respond to users’ laughs

Ontology of laughter: social-ethical aspects

Laughter is very important emotional manifestation for human being. The understanding of laughter’s nature and the determination of its main characters can’t be ignored because laughter is the ability that characterizes and determines the very human way of seeing and understanding the world and the person himself. As a result of the critical analysis, such laughter features as paradoxicality, distancing, openness, freedom, sociality, connection with the sphere of morality are noted and simultaneously indicate the internal unity of consciousness and laughter nature. Laughter built into the structure of human consciousness, and therefore it acquires an ontological character. The article focuses on the social nature of laughter and its educational function. Gradually and consistently, the chain of “consciousness-conscience-laughter-shame” was built during this research. As laughter sometimes can be put in pair with evil, very often the researchers consider it sinful. It was shown that the roots of evil lie not in laughter, but in the person who manipulates its inner abilities

Music History- Laugh and Learn

The project I have chosen aligns with my curriculum project and research. Data will be gathered on the effects of laughter in the classroom. This research will show that humor can motivate students as well as aide memory. Overall, the project should conclude that laughter aids in the learning process. This project has great importance in the field of education, especially music education. Students have come to memorize for the tests, soon forgetting what they have learned. Adding a fun twist on a class that will aide students in their first year of college may increase enrollment. This may also help teachers discover that within reason, laughter plays an important role in education

Finding Light in the Darkness: The Role of Humor

The human story of confrontations with darkness can be lightened with the aid of humor and laughter

An Analysis of Rhythmic Staccato-Vocalization Based on Frequency Demodulation for Laughter Detection in Conversational Meetings

Human laugh is able to convey various kinds of meanings in human communications. There exists various kinds of human laugh signal, for example: vocalized laugh and non vocalized laugh. Following the theories of psychology, among all the vocalized laugh type, rhythmic staccato-vocalization significantly evokes the positive responses in the interactions. In this paper we attempt to exploit this observation to detect human laugh occurrences, i.e., the laughter, in multiparty conversations from the AMI meeting corpus. First, we separate the high energy frames from speech, leaving out the low energy frames through power spectral density estimation. We borrow the algorithm of rhythm detection from the area of music analysis to use that on the high energy frames. Finally, we detect rhythmic laugh frames, analyzing the candidate rhythmic frames using statistics. This novel approach for detection of `positive' rhythmic human laughter performs better than the standard laughter classification baseline.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, conference pape

Expanding AirSTAR Capability for Flight Research in an Existing Avionics Design

The NASA Airborne Subscale Transport Aircraft Research (AirSTAR) project is an Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) test bed for experimental flight control laws and vehicle dynamics research. During its development, the test bed has gone through a number of system permutations, each meant to add functionality to the concept of operations of the system. This enabled the build-up of not only the system itself, but also the support infrastructure and processes necessary to support flight operations. These permutations were grouped into project phases and the move from Phase-III to Phase-IV was marked by a significant increase in research capability and necessary safety systems due to the integration of an Internal Pilot into the control system chain already established for the External Pilot. The major system changes in Phase-IV operations necessitated a new safety and failsafe system to properly integrate both the Internal and External Pilots and to meet acceptable project safety margins. This work involved retrofitting an existing data system into the evolved concept of operations. Moving from the first Phase-IV aircraft to the dynamically scaled aircraft further involved restructuring the system to better guard against electromagnetic interference (EMI), and the entire avionics wiring harness was redesigned in order to facilitate better maintenance and access to onboard electronics. This retrofit and harness re-design will be explored and how it integrates with the evolved Phase-IV operations

The collection of sententiae associated with the mimographer Publilius and its portrayal of laughter, tears, and silence

The purpose of this paper is two-fold: to provide an up-to-date overview of the main problems pertaining to the purpose and transmission of a collection of apophthegms (sententiae), associated with the mime-actor and mimographer Publilius, and to discuss the portrayal of laughter, tears, and silence in the collection. I explore the image that was projected through the sententiae with regard to the above manifestations of non-verbal behaviour, and show how this projection squared with the portrayal of laughter, tears, and silence in select literary writings, including the collection of one-line apophthegms associated with Menander. I finish by suggesting reasons for this portrayal