Vocal drum sounds in human beatboxing: An acoustic and articulatory exploration using electromagnetic articulography

Annalisa Paroni, Nathalie Henrich Bernardoni, Christophe Savariaux, Hélène Lœvenbruck, Pascale Calabrese, Thomas Pellegrini, Sandrine Mouysset, Silvain Gerber
2021 Journal of the Acoustical Society of America  
Acoustic characteristics, lingual and labial articulatory dynamics, and ventilatory behaviors were studied on a beatboxer producing twelve drum sounds belonging to five main categories of his repertoire (kick, snare, hi-hat, rimshot, cymbal). Various types of experimental data were collected synchronously (respiratory inductance plethysmography, electroglottography, electromagnetic articulography, and acoustic recording). Automatic unsupervised classification was successfully applied on
more » ... data with t-SNE spectral clustering technique. A cluster purity value of 94% was achieved, showing that each sound has a specific acoustic signature. Acoustical intensity of sounds produced with the humming technique was found to be significantly lower than their non-humming counterparts. For these sounds, a dissociation between articulation and breathing was observed. Overall, a wide range of articulatory gestures was observed, some of which were non-linguistic. The tongue was systematically involved in the articulation of the explored beatboxing sounds, either as the main articulator or as accompanying the lip dynamics. Two pulmonic and three non-pulmonic airstream mechanisms were identified. Ejectives were found in the production of all the sounds with bilabial occlusion or alveolar occlusion with egressive airstream. A phonetic annotation using the IPA alphabet was performed, highlighting the complexity of such sound production and the limits of speech-based annotation.
doi:10.1121/10.0002921 pmid:33514144 fatcat:6zfwft4wezaa3h2phktozol74u