Beatboxing in Slow Motion - Smarter Every Day 109

Hey, it's me Destin, welcome back to Smarter Every Day. So there are many different types of intelligence in the world right? I mean think about it. If you're good with mechanics you might be spatially intelligent, or if you're good with other people you might be intrapersonally intelligent.

Now this is unfortunate because today I'm not intelligent in the area we're studying. We're gonna look at the components of beat boxing, and then we're gonna use a Phantom to record some slow motion beat boxing, which is insane, and then we're gonna use that data to study the physics of what the mouth is actually doing to produce the sound that we know as beat boxing.

Now I'm not intelligent enough to do this on my own so we're gonna have to go meet somebody that's far more intelligent than I am. I know this might not make sense to you, but this is Flula.

• Hello guys. Boom!

• [laugh] OK. So Flula is a German guy that... What you do... music... That's what you do.

• Ya ya. I like to make beat boxes and loops of techno, hip hop, things like that.

• Yeah so here's the deal. I really like his channel because it's fun and he does music and I don't really understand it. So, you've agreed to give me a lesson in beat boxing?

• Absolutely. So this is a layer looping pedal, and I can create many loops and they layer layer layer on the top. But, if I like, I can bring these to this machine and then I have 4 different tracks to use.

• What?

• Yeah. So should I show you?

• Yeah please.

• [beat boxing] So here is a beat. And now, let us bring it inside here. OK so now, it's in here. It's living inside. Now let us add something right? Let's do it. Boom. Watch out basses. And now maybe some sing-songs, yeah? Right?

• Yeah ok ok ok. I get it, I get it, I get it.

• For me, you know many beat boxers have different things, for me 3 things. There's a bass, like that. And then you have like the snare, like with the sticks, the snare drum.

• Like snare drum.

• Ya ya, snare so and I like, for me I like... Like that. Other people like...

• That's your snare drum? [laughs]

• That's my snare. So and then of course you have the high hat. So put together...

• Yeah. Clearly, OK. Clearly there's skill here, and so here's what we're gonna do. I'm making a trade with Flula. I told him if he would teach me how to beat box, I would create a slow motion video of him beat boxing. So that's what we're gonna do.

So I've got the Miro here, and what we're gonna do is we're going to like look at your lips, are you cool with that?

• Let's do it.

• Di... Did you s... uh... [laughs] Don't even think about it. Let's just analyze it. OK check it out.

We've got Flula up here who's about to drop the bass, and above me I have what's called a spectrogram. I've got time in the X-axis and I have frequency in the Y-axis, so watch this. Check it out. Pretty cool colors.

Now the brighter the colors, that means the louder the frequency is at that particular point in time. Now it looks like we have these dark vertical bars, it's like we have frequency within frequency, and that's exactly what we have and this is very important. It's called Timbre.

Let's play the C2 note on a piano. Now the same note using a triangle wave. You'll notice the fundamental frequencies determine the note and they're the same, but the overtones are different.

These overtones are how our brains recognize different instruments. It's known as the timbre or the color of the sound. So think about the texture of Flula's bass drop. It's actually two different functions working together. The first one is a normal tone coming from his vocal chords. It's just a normal looking sound wave.

But the second thing is coming from his lips. When his lips slam shut, his mouth builds pressure back up until it's high enough to blow that lip out again. The resonant frequency of this is determined by the pressure in his mouth, the flow rate of the air, and how tight he's pushing his lips together.

Both of these functions are combined to create a unique sound signature. So if our slow mo observations are correct, we should be able to see all these things in the spectrogram right?

Yup, check it out. You can plainly see that the fundamental frequency from his vocal chords is down here, and you can see that the lip is slamming shut about every 25ms and stopping that air flow.

You can then see that the sound is loudest immediately after the pressure in his mouth gets high enough to pop that lip open, and if you look really really close you can even see spots where his lip is slamming back shut.

So there you have it. Beat boxers are not just dudes with good rhythm. They're actually biomechanical synthesizers that specialize in the domination of not just the time domain, but also the frequency domain.

OK I hope we earned your subscription today because you learned something, but more importantly, I'd love for you to check out Flula and subscribe to him.

He has never heard of me, I called him because we were in the same city and he agreed to do this, and he's got a smaller channel but I think it's very very clever, and I think he deserves a shot.

I'm gonna leave some links over here. He's done something called auto tunes, where he drives in a car and he plays an entire song by himself in one take. It's extremely clever and I'm very impressed.

So go check that out, those are probably my favorite. And I'll show you what he did with his slow motion footage, which is pretty funny in itself.

Anyway, I'm Destin, you're getting Smarter Every Day, have a good one.

Can you do me an outro, and I'll use it at the end of the video?

• Yes of course. [beat boxing]

(Destin) Thank you very much Flula.

• Of course.