Characteristics of the beatboxing vocal style

Beatboxing is a tradition of vocal percussion which originates in 1980s hip-hop, and is closely connected with hip-hop culture. It involves the vocal imitation of drum machines as well as drums and other percussion, and typically also the simultaneous imitation of basslines, melodies, and vocals, to create an illusion of polyphonic music. It may be performed a capella or with amplification. In this report we describe some characteristics of the beatboxing vocal performance style, as relevant for music signal processing and related fields. In particular we focus on aspects of beatboxing which are different from other vocal styles or from spoken language. Beatboxing developed well outside academia, and separate from the vocal styles commonly studied by universities and conservatories, and so there is (to our knowledge) very little scholarly work on the topic, either its history or its current practice. Beatboxing is mentioned in popular histories of the hip-hop movement, although rarely in detail. An undergraduate thesis looks at phonetic aspects of some beatboxing sounds [Lederer, 2005]. Some technical work is inspired by beatboxing to create (e.g.) a voice-controlled drum-machine [Hazan, 2005a,b, Kapur et al., 2004, Sinyor et al., 2005], although these authors don’t make explicit whether their work has been developed in contact with practising beatboxers. In the following we describe characteristics of beatboxing as contrasted against better-documented traditions such as popular singing [Soto-Morettini, 2006] or classical singing [Mabry, 2002]. Because of the relative scarcity of literature, many of the observations come from the first author’s experiences and observations: both as a participant in beatboxing communities in the UK and online, and during user studies involving beatboxers as part of the first author’s PhD study. We describe certain sounds narratively as well as in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) notation [International Phonetic Association, 1999] (see also [Fukui, 2003]), which will be demarcated by slashes // . The IPA representation may be approximate, since the notation is not designed to accommodate easily the non-linguistic and “extended technique” sounds we discuss.