Secrets of Beatboxing Revealed By MRI

Posted by samzenpus on Monday July 15, 2013 @02:38AM from the mind-of-doug-e-fresh dept.

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)."

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Re: good use of grant money by Ferante125 · 2013-07-15 03:26 · Score: 3, Interesting

They do the scans on Sunday night when they are no patients ( I've been a subject in other experiments). But apart from that, if you think that there's no medical value to this research, you need to sit back and do something that enhances your imagination. They've also studied how cancer patients swallow. Besides the vocal tract, the heart is another organ that needs real time mri, so it's no gimmick. Also this research was from USC, not UCSD.