This is harder to describe than it is to do. What gives the percussive sounds of beatbox so much punch is a strong extra puff of air that gets its juice from using your voicebox as a piston. But when beatboxers do it, it actually sounds worth listening to. Crazy beatbox noise: Ejective stop.Īnyone can imitate a drum by making 'tikatikatikatika poom poom poom' sounds. ( And watch a demonstration of these sounds in the video below.)ġ. Once you have the hang of these, you're well on your way to alarming your friends and making money on street corners.
But there are three key features that stand out in beatbox noises. There are quite a few different kinds of beatboxing, and performers are very inventive, so you'll never get a complete listing of all the sounds. The truth about beatbox sounds is that most of them are just tweaked-up or combined sounds of the kind we use in speech, and nearly all the rest are sounds we could use in speech but usually don't. Linguistics to the rescue! Even if you still can't reproduce the sounds, you will soon be able to talk about them in terms nearly as startling as the sounds themselves. Whenever people listen to a beatboxing expert, there are two big questions that come up: What are those noises? And how are they being made?
