MRI
Inside the vocal tract
Real-time MRI of a beatbox artist showed many of the same mechanisms used in speech, exploited for musical effect.
Explore the sounds
THE SCIENCE OF BEATBOX
A whole drum kit
in one mouth.
Beatboxing turns the voice into percussion.
Kick drums, snares and hi-hats come from the lips, tongue, throat and breath. Scientists have filmed beatboxers inside MRI scanners and wired them with sensors, and found they borrow speech sounds, including some their own languages never use.
BOOM TSS lips, tongue, breath
Explore the sounds- Speech sounds, reused
- Air in and out
- Tongue always busy
- How the vocal tract plays drums
THE SHORT ANSWER
Beatboxers borrow
from speech.
Many beatbox sounds are speech sounds used for rhythm.
Some come from languages the performer does not speak.
SOUNDS
Stops, clicks and ejectives
Beatbox sounds share features with stops, fricatives and affricates, and include clicks and ejectives that the scanned artist's native languages do not use.
See the numbers
APES
Orangutans do it too
Wild orangutans make calls that combine two sound sources at once, a voiced one and an unvoiced one from the lips, tongue and jaw, much as beatboxers do.
Read more
FOUR THINGS TO NOTICE
Listen like
a phonetician.
You do not need a scanner to hear what researchers describe. Try noticing these next time you hear a beatboxer.
Hear the speech inside
Many beats are stops and hisses, close cousins of consonants you use every day.
Notice the tongue
In the sensor study, the tongue was involved in every drum sound, leading or helping the lips.
Listen for a hum
Some performers hum under the beat; those sounds were measurably quieter than their non-humming versions.
Spot the borrowed sounds
Clicks and ejectives are speech sounds in some languages. Beatboxers use them as percussion.
TWO NUMBERS WORTH KNOWING
Every drum
has a signature.
Both from one detailed study
of a beatboxer's repertoire.
12 sounds
Drum sounds studied in five categories
Kick, snare, hi-hat, rimshot and cymbal sounds were recorded with breathing, voice-box and tongue sensors at the same time.
REPERTOIRE · PARONI ET AL. 2021
94%
How well a computer sorted the sounds
An automatic clustering method grouped the recordings with 94% purity, showing that each sound has its own acoustic signature.
ACOUSTICS · PARONI ET AL. 2021
The same study identified two pulmonic and three non-pulmonic airstream mechanisms, and found the tongue was involved in every sound studied.
HOW A BEATBOX SOUND IS MADE
Pick a technique,
see what it uses.
Choose a technique to see what researchers found about it. The bar shows how far it strays from the sounds of everyday English speech.
Based on studies of individual beatboxers: Proctor et al. (2013), Paroni et al. (2021) and Yeshoda and Raveendran (2024).
BEYOND HUMANS
Two sounds
at once.
A 2023 study of wild orangutans reported two types of call that use two independent sound sources at the same time: an unvoiced source from the lips, tongue and jaw, and a voiced one. The authors say these articulatorily resemble human beatboxing.
Researchers also note the limits of their tools: the sensor study found a wide range of gestures, some non-linguistic, and that ordinary speech-based phonetic notation struggles to capture everything a beatboxer does.
Questions
Questions people ask
How do beatboxers make drum sounds?
By shaping the lips, tongue, throat and airflow. Studies show they reuse speech mechanisms such as stops and fricatives, plus sounds like clicks and ejectives.
Is beatboxing like speaking?
Partly. Real-time MRI found many of the same mechanisms used in speech, but exploited for musical effect, including patterns that do not occur in the performer's native languages.
What are clicks and ejectives?
They are kinds of speech sound used in some languages. A real-time MRI study found a beatbox artist using both, although neither occurs in his native languages, and a later study found ejectives in every sound made with the lips or tongue tip closed and air flowing outwards.
Can beatboxers hum and drum at the same time?
Yes. One study found humming-technique sounds were significantly quieter, with articulation and breathing working independently.
Do any animals beatbox?
A 2023 study found wild orangutans making calls with two simultaneous sound sources that resemble human beatboxing in how they are articulated.
Sources
- Proctor et al. (2013), Paralinguistic mechanisms of production in human beatboxing: a real-time MRI study, JASA (PMC)
- Paroni et al. (2021), Vocal drum sounds in human beatboxing, JASA (Europe PMC)
- Yeshoda and Raveendran (2024), Spectral and temporal characteristics of human beatbox sounds, Journal of Voice (Europe PMC)
- Lameira and Hardus (2023), Wild orangutans use two vocal sound sources like beatboxers, PNAS Nexus (PMC)
Updated