Characteristics of the beatboxing vocal style Technical report C4DM-TR-08-01 Dan Stowell and Mark D. Plumbley Centre for Digital Music Department of Electronic Engineering Queen Mary, University of London dan.stowell@elec.qmul.ac.uk 19th February 2008 1 Introduction 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 percus- sion, 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 re- lated fields. In particular we focus on aspects of beat- boxing 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. Beatbox- ing is mentioned in popular histories of the hip-hop movement, although rarely in detail. An under- graduate 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, Ka- pur et al., 2004, Sinyor et al., 2005], although these authors don’t make explicit whether their work has been developed in contact with practising beatbox- ers. In the following we describe characteristics of beat- boxing as contrasted against better-documented tra- ditions such as popular singing [Soto-Morettini, 2006] or classical singing [Mabry, 2002]. Because of the rel- ative scarcity of literature, many of the observations come from the first author’s experiences and obser- vations: both as a participant in beatboxing commu- nities 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. 2 Extended vocal technique Perhaps the most fundamental distinction between the sounds produced while beatboxing and those pro- duced during most other vocal traditions arises from beatboxing’s primary aim to create convincing im- personations of drum tracks. (Contrast this against vocal percussion traditions such as jazz scat singing or indian bol, in which percussive rhythms are imi- tated, but there is no aim to disguise the vocal origin of the sounds.) This aim leads beatboxers to do two 1