Beatboxing Gregorian Chants

I was recently watching a YouTube video called something along the lines of “Amazing Dubstep Beatbox,” where I came across a specific comment stating that this act technically could have been done in the Middle Ages, since it, on paper, requires nothing but the human voice. The video featured a performer using his voice to emulate the very modern and digital sounds of the electronic music genre dubstep. Particularly the side of dubstep that emphasizes intricate sound design, often crafted with modern and sophisticated software such as Serum, often referred to as “brostep.” Something that obviously doesn't correspond with the context of the Middle Ages.

This got me thinking about the similarities between beatboxing and painting. You could technically make a painting of an iPhone or a Tesla, or something equally modern, in the Middle Ages too, using whatever materials were available at the time. A prophetic act.

And just like the function of painting in the Middle Ages was to represent, I would argue that beatboxing functions the same way today. I would go so far as to say that beatboxing functions as pure simulacra: although vocal percussion has existed in earlier forms such as the Indian tradition of Konnakol or jazz scatting, beatboxing differs in that it specifically reproduces the mechanical sounds of the drum machine, thereby imitating a technological medium rather than exploring the “natural” capabilities of the human voice. In this sense, beatboxing represents an abstraction of the voice, a human expression repurposed to reproduce the mechanical, whereas jazz scatting belongs closer to seduction, in which the voice plays freely with sound and meaning rather than simulating them.

Even today, after the discipline of beatboxing has grown more complex, with new methods introduced and far more intricate patterns, the idea remains the same: to cyborgianly simulate the electronic sounds of modern electronic music with the mouth, with skill measured by how closely the imitation resembles the source…

Human expression within a representational medium (painting) got  

replaced by a mechanic, more “objective”, counterpart (the camera). 

<---------> 

The mechanic sounds of 80's hip hop (the drum machine) got imitated by 

human expression (beatboxing). 

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above,” God once said, resulting in what we know of iconoclasm today: pictures destroyed to hide the fact that God is a simulacrum, since you cannot portray what is not in front of you (especially in a time when paintings were supposed to represent, not invent). Beatboxing has no choice but to simulate its own creator; it is the premise of its existence. But just as religious iconoclasts destroyed images to confront the impossibility of representing the divine, the beatboxer confronts the impossibility of perfectly reproducing the mechanical, therefore distorting the sonic image of the inhumanly “perfect” and hereby demonstrating that perfect simulation is unreachable, since doing so would be akin to simulating God.

Painting, confronted with the camera’s superior capacity for representation, instinctively turned toward abstraction in order to survive. Painters soon realized that photography could serve not only as a rival but also as a tool, and in this way painting developed a built-in survival mechanism: the capacity to absorb and reinterpret everything visual. What is beatboxing going to do in order to survive? I am not sure if beatboxing was ever proclaimed dead, as opposed to painting, but nevertheless the same thing that painting did can be done with beatboxing: engulf whatever new EDM track is hitting the charts and spit it back out again, all humanly flawed and full of saliva.

In this sense, painting that contains a great amount of representation, or “photorealism,” painted after the invention of the camera, is a close relative to beatboxing. Both are instances in which everything but the fact that the work passed through a human is scraped away, leaving only an adaptation of an emulation that is more or less full of mistakes. Because mistakes are what make us human.