Question: how do you change your voice to make beatbox sounds etc..., i can beatbox but not very well ?

Carolyn McGettigan answered on 18 Mar 2010:

Great question. I want to know the answer too, so I’m really keen to meet some beatboxers to ask them loads of questions about what they do and maybe even scan their brain to see which bits of it are being recruited for performance.

The sounds we produce from our mouth, usually in speech, are produced through a combination of vibrations from our vocal folds in our ‘voice box’ (where the ‘adam’s apple’ is on the front of the throat), and movements made by all our ‘articulators’ (jaw, teeth, tongue, lips and more). You can feel your vocal folds buzzing if you put your fingers on the front of your throat and say a word, let’s say ‘beatboxing’. If you repeat the word, but whisper it instead, you won’t feel that buzzing. In beatboxing, the performers use clever combinations of sounds that use that buzz in the voicebox (maybe for a bassline, a spoken bit of the track or a melody) and sounds that don’t use this (like the drumming and click sounds). The beatboxers have learned to make all these sounds so close together in time that when you listen to their performance it sounds like lots of different instruments and voices playing continuously at once, which is pretty amazing. Each individual sound has also been practised to sound like the instruments the performer is imitating. They usually perform with microphones and a lot of amplification too, and I think using the distortion created by the amplification can help make some of these sounds coming from the voice sound more like instruments we’re used to hearing over speakers or headphones.

Just speaking is pretty amazing too – our articulators move very quickly to make combinations of sounds, while our voice box buzz turns on and off at the right places for the speech sounds that need it. There’s a lot of work going on in our throats and mouths just to say the simplest things!

I was hoping my schools event would include a beatboxing workshop for some of the students, with a concert at the end of the day – do you think people would like that?