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Father Christmas has probably never gone “ho ho ho!” in his life. More likely, he just grunts, according to the largest ever study into the sound of laughter.

This left the researchers with more than a thousand bursts of laughter to analyse. “One of the biggest surprises was the variety of sounds that constitute laughter,” she says.

Laughter can be “voiced” or song-like – such as giggles and chuckles – or unvoiced, like grunts and snorts. Most of the subjects produced a wide range of laughter types. But women produce voiced, song-like bursts of laughter more often than men, Bachorowski found, while men are more likely to grunt and snort.

Laughter clichés

The researchers also noted the vowel sounds in the laughter. These can be central – with the mouth more open – as in “turn” or “car”, or non-central, as in “he” or “glow”.

The team heard very few examples of non-central vowels, scuppering the idea that people often go “tee hee” or “ho ho ho”. Other laughter clichés failed to hold up. “Stereotypes accounted for less than half of the laughter recorded,” she says.

The subjects were all Americans, but Bachorowski says the findings may apply to other cultures. “I suspect that culture shapes the circumstances in which we use laughter rather than its features.”

Journal reference: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (vol 110, p 1581)