Prof. Narayanan Synthesizes Laughter
Prof. Shri Narayanan likes to leave them laughing. He and Shiva Sundaram, a PhD student in electrical engineering at IMSC, received coverage on WTOP Radio in the Washington, DC, area when they presented a paper on synthesizing human laughter to the Acoustical Society of America meeting in San Diego in November. Their synthesis technique, developed at the Speech Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL), assumes a dynamic oscillator model for laughter and can parametrically control the laughter model. Consequently, it can be used for a wide variety of happy expressions. Prof. Narayanan said it can also be used to capture and generate speaker-specific traits in laughter. Listen to the WTOP report with the laughter sample [MP3, :32], and visit http://sail.usc.edu/~ssundara/index.html for further details. The SAIL Web site is http://sail.usc.edu.