Beatboxing

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Beatboxing turns the human mouth into a one-person drum machine. In the early 1980s, in the inner-city neighbourhoods of New York, young people began mimicking the Roland TR-808 with nothing but their lips, tongues, throats, and voices, because real drum machines were either unavailable or simply too expensive. What started as a workaround became an art form. Today it is recognised as the unofficial fifth element of hip-hop, alongside DJing, MCing, graffiti, and breakdancing. But its roots run much deeper than hip-hop, and its reach extends far wider. How did a technique found in 19th-century American folk music end up in a West End musical and a GEICO Super Bowl commercial? And what does it actually mean, phonetically and physically, to make a snare drum with your face?

• 2. Deep Roots

  ›

  Techniques similar to beatboxing appeared across American musical genres as far back as the 19th century, turning up in early rural music among both Black and white communities, in religious songs, blues, ragtime, vaudeville, and hokum. One named example is the Appalachian technique called eefing. Another is the blues song "Bye Bye Bird" by Sonny Boy Williamson II, which features vocal percussion embedded in the performance. African traditional music may also have supplied a parallel thread, as performers in those traditions used the body, through clapping, stomping, and loud inward and outward breathing, as a percussive instrument. That breathing technique in particular survives directly in beatboxing today.

  Well-known recording artists absorbed these approaches without necessarily being aware of the lineage. Paul McCartney's 1970 track "That Would Be Something" contains vocal percussion. Pink Floyd's "Pow R. Toc H." from 1967 features vocal percussion performed by Syd Barrett, the group's original lead vocalist. Jazz singers Bobby McFerrin and Al Jarreau built vocal styles that would profoundly shape the techniques beatboxers later refined. Michael Jackson recorded himself beatboxing on a dictation tape recorder as a way of composing demos, laying down the bones of songs including "Billie Jean" and "The Girl Is Mine" before a single instrument was played. Even Gert Fröbe, the German actor best known for playing Auric Goldfinger in the 1965 James Bond film of the same name, produced a form of beatboxing in the British comedy film "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines" that same year, simultaneously vocalising horned and percussive instruments as Colonel Manfred von Holstein.

• 3. Hip-Hop Pioneers

  ›

  "Human beatboxing" as a named practice within hip-hop took shape in the 1980s, built by a small group of figures who each pushed the craft in a distinct direction. Buffy is credited as the first human beatbox, and also as the person who helped perfect many of the foundational techniques. Swifty was the first to implement the inhale sound technique. Wise expanded the audience for the art with his human turntable technique, inspiring an entirely new generation of practitioners. Rahzel became known for his realistic robotic sounds and, more unusually, for his ability to sing and beatbox at the same time. Scratch further advanced the use of vocal scratching within beatboxing. Kenny Muhammad, called the Human Orchestra, was recognised for his technical precision and for pioneering the inward k snare, a technique that imitates a snare drum by drawing air inward. Emanon, an early protegee of Doug E. Fresh, had connections to both Ice T and Afrika Islam.

  The very word "beatboxing" came from the machines these artists were imitating. Early Roland drum machines including the TR-55 and CR-78 were already being called beatboxes in the 1970s. The TR-808, released in 1980, became so central to hip-hop and electronic dance music that human beatboxing is largely modelled on its specific sound palette. The goal in a cipher, a gathering of performers improvising together, was to recreate that machine's bass kick, snare, and hi-hat from scratch, using only the body.

• 4. The Internet Era

  ›

  Alex Tew, performing under the name A-Plus, launched the first online community for beatboxers in 2000 under the banner HUMANBEATBOX.COM. A year later, Gavin Tyte, a member of that community, created the world's first written and video tutorials on the art form. The 2001 South Korean romantic comedy film "My Sassy Girl" provided an early example of beatboxing reaching mainstream audiences outside the United States. By 2003, the HUMANBEATBOX.COM community had grown large enough to organise the world's first Human Beatbox Convention in London, drawing artists from across the globe.

  Modern beatboxers have extended the physical toolkit beyond the face. Some blow and suck air around their fingers to replicate the sound of a record scratch, a technique known as the "crab scratch". Others tap their fingers against their throats while throat-singing or humming, a move called the "throat tap". Artists including Beardyman, KRNFX, and The Petebox went further still by incorporating live looping hardware such as the Boss RC-505, which lets a performer sample and layer their own sounds in real time on stage, building full musical compositions the way a DJ might, but using only their voice and a loop pedal. Greg Patillo combined beatboxing with the flute, applying the technique to well-known songs and producing a sound unlike conventional performance in either tradition. The films "Pitch Perfect" and "Pitch Perfect 2" brought beatbox-driven a cappella to wide popular audiences, showing choirs recreating full arrangements of songs entirely with their voices.

• 5. Phonology and Notation

  ›

  A 2013 research study, based on real-time MRI imaging of a beatboxer, found that many beatboxing sounds can be adequately represented by the International Phonetic Alphabet. The authors proposed a notation system combining the IPA with standard musical staff notation. Mark Splinter and Gavin Tyte of Humanbeatbox.com had already created Standard Beatbox Notation in 2006 as a more accessible alternative to IPA transcription, which had been used only occasionally up to that point.

  Phonetically, beatboxing draws on three distinct categories of sound. Ejectives are powerful puffs of air from the voice box that give percussive sounds their intensity; the "p", "t", and "k" sounds can all be made into ejectives, as can affricates like "ch" and "j". Nonstandard fricatives cover mechanical sounds like snare drums and cymbals; some of these, including velar lateral fricatives and bilabial lateral fricatives, are classified as impossible by standard IPA theory yet are demonstrably producible and common in beatboxing. Coarticulation is the control of a single sound at two points in the vocal tract simultaneously. One example is the combination of a rolled "r" and a "v", which together produce what linguists call a voiced alveolar trill with labiodental articulation. A related phenomenon, epenthesis, is what happens when a beatboxer raps and adds percussion sounds inside the syllables of words, placing the percussive hit mid-word so that the tongue appears to be in two places at once, even though it is not.

• 6. Records and Global Reach

  ›

  The Guinness World Records largest human beatbox ensemble was set on the 26th of June 2017 by The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups, which assembled 6,430 participants to mark the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The record before that had been set on the 10th of December 2013 at the RAI Amsterdam, when Booking.com employees joined with professional beatboxers during the company's annual meeting, reaching 4,659 participants. Google Ireland, along with UK beatboxers Shlomo and Testament, had previously claimed the record on the 14th of November 2011 at The Convention Centre in Dublin with 2,081 participants. The record before that was held by Vineeth Vincent and Christ University in Bangalore, Karnataka, India, with 1,246 participants on the 5th of February 2011.

  In Hawaii, beatboxer Jason Tom, of Hawaii Chinese descent, co-founded the Human Beatbox Academy to sustain the art through outreach performances, workshops, and speaking engagements in Honolulu. The concept of multi-vocalism, a framework for beatboxers who incorporate singing, rapping, sound mimicry, and other vocal practices into a single performance, was formally conceptualised by British beatboxer and vocalist Killa Kela. His 2002 release "The Permanent Marker" is among the recordings listed as influential in the art form's commercial history, alongside Doug E. Fresh's 1985 double release of "The Show" and "La Di Da Di", which helped carry the practice out of the cipher and into mainstream recorded music.