Alexis Dehais-Underdown

What is beatboxing?

What am I searching for ?

I am interested in exploring the potential of the human vocal tract by understanding beatboxing production. Human Beatboxing (HBB) is a vocal technique that uses the vocal tract to imitate musical instruments and other musical sonorities. Similar to languages like French or English, HBB relies on the combination of smaller units (sounds for ex.) into larger ones (sentences for ex.). Unlike linguistic systems, HBB has no meaning: while we speak to be understood, beatboxers do not perform to be understood. Speech production obeys to linguistic constraints to ensure efficient communication, for example, each language has a finite number of vowels and consonants. This is not the case for HBB so beatboxers use a larger number of sounds.

How do I investigate ?

I used 3 technics on 5 professional beatboxers : (1) aerodynamic recordings, (2) laryngoscopic recordings and (3) acoustic recordings. We also ran a pilot MRI recording session on one subject. Aerodynamic data gives information about pressure and airflow changes resulting from articulatory movements. Laryngoscopic images give a view of the different anatomical laryngeal structures and their role in beatboxing production. Acoustic data allows us to investigate the spectral characteristics of sounds in terms of frequency and intensity.

What type of sound do I record ?

Here are a few examples extracted from a larger database :

My findings

My principal results are disponible in my PhD manuscript. The results show that beatboxers use the same production mechanisms to those found in the world’s languages, but beatboxers use a greater number of different sound combinations. We observed the use of the 6 possible initiation mechanisms combined with several articulatory mechanisms that give rise to discrete acoustic signatures. Signatures distinguish between different categories (bass drums, snare drums) but also sounds within the same category (K-Snare Inward, pf snare).

We have also shown that beatboxed voice production is based on complex phonatory strategies combining regular and irregular periodic elements, aperiodic elements (friction) and out-of-phase periodic elements (double voice). Finally, we showed that the use of whistled mechanisms could be superimposed on other mechanisms.

All these elements suggest that the Human Beatbox does indeed possess the properties of a discrete and complex combinatorial system. Beatboxing primitives are the same as primitives of sound systems, but in beatboxing, the combination possibilities and coordination patterns are different from speech.