Hello, my name is Erik Olsen, and this past semester, I undertook some independent study time to research the articulatory phonetics of beatboxing. As such my studies centered around examining how beatboxers create rhythmic musical sounds, many of which they do not use in everyday speech, using the elements of their vocal tract.
These elements (pictured below) are called "articulators", they are: the lips, teeth, tongue, alveolar ridge, hard palate, velum, uvula, pharynx, glottis, and vocal folds. It is through minute changes in these articulators, that we speak, sing, whistle, and even beatbox.
To denote different sounds made by different combinations and uses of these articulators, language professionals -- linguists, vocal coaches, speech pathologists etc. -- use an International Phonetic Alphabet that is abbreviated as IPA. IPA was used in this project to accurately describe the sounds that were being made and recorded, so that someone else would be able to reproduce the sounds on their own. My goal is to expand this page and have it exist as a resource both for students of phonetics as well as aspiring beatboxers. For those who are interested here are some IPA related links: The York University interactive IPA Flash Charts.
The IPA page on Wikipedia. Without further ado -- the point of this page Here I have recorded, and minimally analyzed thirteen different basic beatboxing sounds. Enjoy!
Bass/Kick Drum
Some voiceless bilabial ejectives followed by unvoiced near-close vowels.
[p'ɪ̥]
If you look closely, you can see the faint vowel formants of the [ɪ̥]. They're the darker horizontal lines in the grey box on the bottom half of the image, this part of the image is called the spectrogram.
[p'ʊ̥]
(Now I know that sounded extremely similar to the first, but the difference is in the unvoiced vowel shape made after the ejective. Here the vowel is the vowel in "put" & "wood", while the first is the vowel in "sit".)
Again, you can see faint formant lines indicating the presence/influence of the vowel shape on the sound.
Hi-hat
Closed Big Hit - voiceless velar and alveolar stop followed by an unvoiced sibilant alveolar fricative .
[ks]
You can see where the majority of the intensity is (the darkest line), and where the sound comes to a complete stop as I close my lips.
Open Light Tap - A voiceless alveolar stop followed by a long unvoiced sibilant alveolar fricative.
[tsː]
Here again you can see in what frequency range most of the intensity lies, and you can also see where the sound from the [t] ends and the [s] continues.
Cymbal
Ride Cymbal - A voiceless velar stop followed by a long unvoiced palato alveolar sibilant.
[tʃː]
Crash Cymbal - A voiceless velar stop followed by a long unvoiced palatal non-sibilant fricative.
[kçː]
Here, the spectrogram shows the tones in the fricative of the crash, and you can see the distinct lines forming, showing you where the formants would be if the sound had a bit more of a tone.
Snare Drum
Meshed Snare - A voiceless velar stop followed by an unvoiced palatal, non-sibilant fricative, followed by an unvoiced near-close near-back vowel.
[kçʊ̥]
808 Snare - A voiceless bilabial stop followed by an unvoiced labiodental ejective fricative.
[pf'ː]
Rim Shot
A voiceless Velar ejective.
[k']
A voiceless Velar stop followed by an unvoiced velar fricative.
[kx]
Again we can see some sort of formants
An alveolar lateral click.
[ǀǀ]
This spectrogram is unique in that this click has only a brief moment of intensity, beginning and ending very quickly with a clear cut-off
Toms
Single Tom - A voiced alveolar implosive followed by a close-mid central rounded vowel.
[ɗ ɵ]
Here we can see where Praat picked up an actual pitch (the blue line) and mapped its frequency starting at roughly 148 Hz and descending to near 115Hz.
Tom Roll - A voiced alveolar implosive followed by a long voiced alveolar trill, followed by a close-mid central rounded vowel.
[ɗ rːɵ]
Once again, we see the blue line of a pitch, but now we also see these vertical dark lines in the spectrogram, each of those is one of the articulations of the trill. Interestingly, in the waveform in the top half of this image we can see an increase in the number of waves at the end of the waveform which can be attributed to the little whistle that came as a result of closing my lips as I ended the trill.
