Scientists unsuccessfully trying to synthesize laughter

Frequency patterns with strong harmonics make human laughter a rather complex object for computer synthesis.



As New Scientist writes , several groups of scientists are fighting over this task, who are trying to use different approaches.

Jürgen Trouvain and colleagues at the University of Sarrbrucken (Germany), for example, try to simulate the movements of the vocal apparatus and the air flow.
')
Gregory Beller (Grégory Beller) from the University of Pierre and Mary Curie (Paris), uses a completely different approach. They took the usual text synthesizer and try to impose on the sound some kind of distortion to create a simulation of various emotions , which are expressed in laughter.

At the same time, Shiva Sundaram in the research division of Deutsche Telekom uses linear predictive coding to generate individual elements of laughter (“ha”), as well as a simple algorithm for timing.

Jerome Urbain (Jérôme Urbain) from the University of Mons (Belgium) found the easiest way at all: mixing and manipulating real samples recorded by people.

Which approach is more successful - you decide. You can try to pass a kind of Turing test and try to determine the difference between human and synthesized laughter.