From the Acoustical Society of America posting at Phys Org:
How beatboxers produce sound: Using real-time MRI to understand
Beatboxing is a musical art form in which performers use their vocal tract to create percussive sounds. Sometimes individual beatboxers perform as a part of an ensemble, using their vocal tracts to provide beats for other musicians; other times, beatboxers perform alone, where they might sing and beatbox simultaneously or simply make sounds without singing.
A team of researchers is using real-time MRI to study the production of beatboxing sounds. Timothy Greer, a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California, will describe their work showing how real-time MRI can characterize different beatboxing styles and how video signal processing can demystify the mechanics of artistic style. Greer will present the study at the Acoustical Society of America's 176th Meeting, held in conjunction with the Canadian Acoustical Association's 2018 Acoustics Week in Canada, Nov. 5-9 at the Victoria Conference Centre in Victoria, Canada.
The team is interested in using real-time MRI data to observe the vocal tracts of beatboxers just before they make a sound to see if those movements are different from speech. The real-time MRI data provides a dynamic view of the entire midsagittal vocal tract and at a frame rate high enough to observe the movement and coordination of critical articulators.
There is a short video at the site - fun stuff.
The meeting sounded (arrrrgghhh...) really interesting - if it had been in Vancouver I would have seriously thought about driving up and crashing it. Here is its website: Acoustics Week in Canada 2018
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