Secrets of Beatboxing Revealed By MRI

united_notions writes "An international team from UCSD and Philips Research have published a paper (article paywalled; extensive free related resources at UCS here) in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, showing the results of real-time magnetic resonance imaging conducted on a beatboxing performer. The authors make interesting comparisons to sounds in many minority languages around the world (such as the 'click' consonants in many African languages); they also show how beatboxing sounds can be represented using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)."

Comments

Re:good use of grant money

[gstoddart]

So they should stop all forms of research until there are no sick people left? I'm sure they're not bumping critical patients to do this work.

Sometimes in the process of learning how some of these things work, you can stumble on ways to help with other things.

Editing

[bgeezus]

Note: USC is not the same thing as UCSD is not the same thing as UCS... But for all you naysayers, keep in mind that there is a tremendous amount we don't understand about the way humans produce sound. By studying the fundamental mechanisms behind human speech production, we can gain insight into that process, and can understand more accurately what happens when things go wrong.