Beatboxing: Teaching technical acoustical concepts through pop culture

The motivation for this presentation is to demonstrate that vocal percussion, or “beatboxing,” can be a rich method of teaching and demonstrating various introductory acoustical concepts. Beatboxing can be an entertaining way to demonstrate the different acoustical sources of energy—namely burst, noise, and voice—and how they can be combined to create familiar and unfamiliar phonemes, such as the “PF” snare. It also provides an engaging way to introduce the anatomy of the vocal tract as the students can see and hear how vibrating different parts of the mouth and throat (e.g., vocal cords, epiglottis, vestibular folds, lips, etc.) alter the sound. Finally, beatboxing can be used to demonstrate the source-filter model of speech production through altering the sound source in the throat and displaying how to change your mouth shape to produce different formant-altering effects, such as the rapid formant shifting that gives a record scratch its characteristic sound. Beatboxing provides an entertaining and effective way to demonstrate technical concepts to students in an artistic format which captures the attention, especially of younger audiences. [Undergraduate research supported by the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, at Brigham Young University.]