M1 paid internship (3 months, January – March 2020)
Master Subject 1:
Spectographic interpretations: Can we ‘read’ emotions from spectrograms of human vocalisations?
Laboratory:
Equipe de Neuro-Ethologie Sensorielle ENES / CRNL
University of Lyon / Saint-Etienne,
CNRS UMR5292, INSERM UMR_S 1028
23 rue Michelon
42023 Saint-Etienne cedex 2
France
Supervisors:
Dr. Katarzyna PISANSKI University of Lyon / St Etienne, ENES (
kasiapisanski@gmail.com )
Prof. David REBY University of Lyon / St Etienne, ENES (
dreby@me.com )
Prof. Nicolas MATHEVON University of Lyon / St Etienne, ENES (
mathevon@univ-st-etienne.fr )
Description of the Project:
While
surprisingly understudied in humans, nonverbal vocalisations such as
laughter, screams, roars, and cries are frequently produced across a
range of social and interpersonal contexts (Anikin et al. 2018). They
are observed in every human culture and are evolutionarily ancient –
probably predating speech and language – showing clear parallels with
the affective vocalizations of other mammals including primates (Bryant
and Aktipis, 2014). Studying human vocalisations can therefore provide
novel insight into the evolution and social functions of vocal
behaviour.
Form-function analyses of human
vocalisations reveal that their acoustic structure (form) maps onto
their purported evolved or social function. For example, babies’ cries
that are recorded in a painful context (vaccine) compared to a
distressing context (bath) tend to be louder, higher pitched, and are
characterized by relatively more spectral nonlinearities such as
deterministic chaos and sub-harmonics (Koutseff et al., 2018). All of
these acoustic features can contribute to the cries ‘unpleasant’
quality, and are thought to function to elicit immediate attention and
aid from a caregiver, who will be highly motivated to stop the aversive
crying (for review see Pisanski & Bryant, 2018).
While
there is good empirical evidence that naïve human listeners can gauge
motivational and emotional states from audio of human vocalisations and
speech, it has not been tested whether they can do the same based only
on a visual representation of such sounds (i.e., voice spectrogram).
Given that humans possess deep-rooted cross-modal association between
sounds and other modalities, including vision (Spence, 2011 for review),
we predict that listeners will perform well in such a task, even if
they have no prior experience reading spectrograms. This project will
therefore test whether men and women can assess various motivations and
emotions (e.g., pain level) of human vocalisations or speech using only
the corresponding spectrogram of the sound.
The
successful candidate will be responsible for performing acoustic
analysis of vocal stimuli, preparing the acoustic and visual stimuli
(vocalisations and spectrograms) and experimental platform for
playback/rating experiments, and conducting these experiments with human
participants (raters).
Profile of the candidate:
The
candidate must have some foundation in bioacoustics and acoustic
analysis, particularly useful would be some experience producing and
reading spectrograms. Experience with Praat acoustic analysis software,
and/or knowledge of human or animal voice production and perception and
animal behavior, are additional assets. The candidate should also have
very good writing skills and knowledge of statistical analysis.
A
strong motivation for data collection and analysis, seriousness and
rigor in the conduct of experimental protocols and an autonomous working
capacity will be essential. The student will contribute to the joint
activities of the ENES laboratory.
Publications related to the project:
Anikin,
A., Bååth, R., & Persson, T. (2018). Human non-linguistic vocal
repertoire: Call types and their meaning. Journal of nonverbal behavior,
42(1), 53-80.
Bryant, G. A., & Aktipis, C.
A. (2014). The animal nature of spontaneous human laughter. Evolution
and Human Behavior, 35(4), 327-335.
Koutseff,
A., Reby, D., Martin, O., Levrero, F., Patural, H., & Mathevon, N.
(2018). The acoustic space of pain: cries as indicators of distress
recovering dynamics in pre-verbal infants. Bioacoustics, 27(4), 313-325.
Pisanski, K., & Bryant, G. A. (2016). The evolution of voice perception. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Spence, C. (2011). Crossmodal correspondences: A tutorial review. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 73(4), 971-995.
M2 paid internship (6 months, January – June 2020)
Master Subject 2:
Do men and women laugh differently? Investigating the role of acoustic cues to gender in human vocalisations
Laboratory:
Equipe de Neuro-Ethologie Sensorielle ENES / CRNL
University of Lyon / Saint-Etienne,
CNRS UMR5292, INSERM UMR_S 1028
23 rue Michelon
42023 Saint-Etienne cedex 2
France
Supervisors:
Dr. Katarzyna PISANSKI University of Lyon / St Etienne, ENES (
kasiapisanski@gmail.com )
Prof. David REBY University of Lyon / St Etienne, ENES (
dreby@me.com )
Prof. Nicolas MATHEVON University of Lyon / St Etienne, ENES (
mathevon@univ-st-etienne.fr )
Prof. Greg BRYANT University of California Los Angeles, UCLA (
gabryant@ucla.edu )
Description of the Project:
While
surprisingly understudied in humans, nonverbal vocalisations such as
laughter, screams, roars, and cries are frequently produced across a
range of social and interpersonal contexts (Anikin et al. 2018). They
are observed in every human culture and are evolutionarily ancient –
probably predating speech and language – showing clear parallels with
the affective vocalizations of other mammals including primates (Bryant
and Aktipis, 2014). Studying human vocalisations can therefore provide
novel insight into the evolution and social functions of vocal
behaviour.
Laughter is one of the most commonly
produced and most extensively studied human nonverbal vocalisations.
Laughter functions as a social tool during social interactions. For
example, it may be used to communicate positive regard, humour, or even
sarcasm, and can help to form and reinforce social bonds or to
communicate these bonds to bystanders (Scott et al. 2014). However,
compared to speech, little is known about the indexical information
embedded within the laughter signal itself, such as cues to a person’s
age, sex, or relative level of masculinity and femininity.
This
project will examine whether cues to gender attributes (i.e., sex,
masculinity/femininity) are present in human laughter. Using archived
online audio-video databases of laughter, we will compare the acoustic
structure of men’s and women’s laughs to test whether men laugh with a
more ‘masculine’ acoustic profile compared to women, after controlling
for intrinsic sexual dimorphism in men’s and women’s voice frequencies.
The
successful candidate will be responsible for collating a database of
men’s and women’s laughs, performing acoustic analysis of the stimuli,
preparing the acoustic stimuli and experimental platform for playback
experiments, and conducting playback experiments with human participants
(listeners).
Profile of the candidate:
The
candidate must have a solid foundation in either bioacoustics, voice
production and perception, evolutionary/experimental psychology, and
animal/human behavior. She or he should have very good writing skills
and knowledge of statistical analysis, as well as experience in acoustic
analysis (e.g., Praat software).
A strong
motivation for both online and lab-based data collection, seriousness
and rigor in the conduct of experimental protocols and an autonomous
working capacity will be essential. The student will contribute to the
joint activities of the ENES laboratory.
Publications related to the project:
Anikin,
A., Bååth, R., & Persson, T. (2018). Human non-linguistic vocal
repertoire: Call types and their meaning. Journal of nonverbal behavior,
42(1), 53-80.
Bryant, G. A., & Aktipis, C.
A. (2014). The animal nature of spontaneous human laughter. Evolution
and Human Behavior, 35(4), 327-335.
Bryant, G.
A., Fessler, D. M., Fusaroli, R., Clint, E., Amir, D., Chávez, B., ...
& Fux, M. (2018). The perception of spontaneous and volitional
laughter across 21 societies. Psychological Science, 29(9), 1515-1525.
Owren,
M. J., & Bachorowski, J. A. (2003). Reconsidering the evolution of
nonlinguistic communication: The case of laughter. Journal of Nonverbal
Behavior, 27(3), 183-200.
Simpson, A. P. (2009). Phonetic differences between male and female speech. Language and linguistics compass, 3(2), 621-640.
Scott,
S. K., Lavan, N., Chen, S., & McGettigan, C. (2014). The social
life of laughter. Trends in cognitive sciences, 18(12), 618-620.
