Beatboxers and their Linguistic Capabilities

After Professor Sumner demonstrated the change in pitch between the vowels [i] and [ɑ] by flicking her throat, I showed everyone around me just how cool language production is. We also learned that by flicking our throats 150 to 200 times per second, we would be replicating the vibrations of our vocal folds which produce the sounds from inside our throats. At the time, it amazed me that we could hear definitive pitch changes simply by striking our throats as we change the position of our vocal folds. This reminded me of beatboxers and their ability to produce a litany of sounds, with the same speech anatomy used to produce spoken language.

In class, we watched a clip on how a beatboxer's lips, tongue, and throat move in order to form the sounds they make. Beatboxers don't try to replicate sounds from their respective languages, but rather sounds from instruments. For this reason, beatboxing is also referred to as vocal percussion. Though, the sounds in beatboxing aren't usually sounds found traditionally in spoken language, many of them are based in common sounds found in languages around the world. For example, a beatbox tutorial on Wikihow starts out with the “classic kick drum,” which is at first a [b], but with added pressure becomes more 'drum-like.' The article goes on to detail how to go from a [ts] to a “hi-hat,” from a [pf] to a “classic snare drum,” and more. My interest in beatboxers comes from the same place as many other linguists. They use the same muscles and organs to produce beatboxing that all speakers use to produce language. Additionally, beatboxers create sounds that originate from spoken language, but are not from languages they speak naturally.

Looking further into the subject, I happened upon Standard Beatbox Notation, essentially a written language for beatboxing. Of course, beatboxing is not a language as these sounds carry no semantic content, but having written notation presupposes a standard way to produce many of the more basic sounds found in beatboxing. I previously stated that beatboxing tutorials often have beginners start with common sounds. Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist and Slate editor, alluded to this topic when she discussed studies done by USC, looking at how beatboxers formed sounds. These studies also looked at how connected these sounds were to spoken languages. However, what I found most astonishing were the ramifications of beatboxing's basis in language and its capability to produce sounds beyond the beatboxer's natural language.


English speakers who beatbox use parts of their mouth and vocal tracts that aren't widely used in English. They have to, as they naturally experiment with the sudden liberty of their mouth and voice. Yet, in producing these sounds, they expand their sound repertoire beyond their own natural language. McCulloch's article juxtaposes a click from a beatbox tutorial video with a click from a Southern African language, KhoeKhoegowab. The same sound is produced. Ejective consonants are also used in beatboxing, and other languages around the world, but are not apparent in English. I am unsure if there are studies on this subject, but I would offer that beatboxers have an easier time of pronouncing words of a foreign language given their familiarity with using different parts of their speech anatomy. However, their ability to form sounds in languages they themselves do not speak suggests that humans can produce a finite amount of sounds. Nevertheless, this intersection of music and language leads me to conclude that if anyone can create an entirely new sound never heard before from instruments or people, it will be the work of a beatboxer.

Wikihow: How To Beatbox
http://www.wikihow.com/Beatbox
Standard Beatbox Notation (SBN) "Table 1"
http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/84361063129/the-science-of-b-b-b-beatboxing
Gretchen McCulloch's Article "The Science of B-B-B-Beatboxing"
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/04/30/beatboxing_using_mri_to_compare_a_beatboxer_s_sounds_to_language.html