Boots and Cats: The Past, Present, and Future of Beatboxing

Animal sounds. Machine gun sounds on the playground. Sounds of the wind and rain. Explosions. From a young age, we are constantly imitating inhuman and frankly inorganic sounds for play, for comedic effect, and for storytelling. Indeed, pretending to be in the jungle just doesn’t feel right unless your friends growl together loudly and obnoxiously like tigers. That is the essence of the art that may occasionally be considered a useless hobby: the art of beatboxing.

A form of vocal percussion, beatboxing is the art of mimicking drum machines using the mouth, lips, tongue, and voice. Beginning with roots in hip-hop, beatboxing has expanded far beyond that and become a worldwide phenomenon, with tens of thousands of individuals practicing the art form across the planet. It’s an activity that anyone with a mouth and love of music can try, and I’m hoping that you’ll give it a shot after learning more about it.

Boots n’ Cats - The First Steps to Beatboxing

So you’ve heard about the hype around beatboxing. Maybe you’ve seen it on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, or for those who remember, Vine. And now after reading about how cool it is, you want to give it a shot. How in the world does someone get started beatboxing?

Repeat after me - “boots and cats.”

That’s it! Well, sort of. In the end, however, it’s not much more complicated.

The first sound you’ll want to make is called the “kick drum.” You are emulating the kick drum of a traditional drum kit with this sound. That’s what the word “boots” is trying to emulate. To make the sound, you take any word starting with the letter “b” and remove everything else from the word. Congratulations, you’ve learned the “kick drum!”

The second sound is the “hi-hat.” Again, you are trying to imitate the hi-hat part of a drum kit. To make the sound, you just say the letters “ts” and you’re done! This is by far the easiest sound to make in beatboxing.

The third and final basic sound is the “snare.” That’s the sound that the word “cats” attempts to make. Like the “kick drum,” you just have to take any word starting with the letter “c” or “k” and remove everything else from the word.

For a video demonstration of these three sounds, you can follow along with the video below:

With these three sounds, you can practically make any beat in hip hop, so long as you string them together in the right combination! As you delve deeper into it, you will pick up other sounds into your beatboxing vocabulary that you can incorporate into your beats, enriching them and making them more exciting and robust.

You might feel somewhat foolish trying these sounds in your room for the first time, but trust me, with enough practice you can get really good. It’s just like any other instrument, where you only get good with enough practice. Some sounds can take months of practice to nail down. The advantage to beatboxing, however, is that it’s an instrument in your mouth. Because of this, there’s no physical requirement for location or equipment. You can practice beatboxing while multitasking, while on the go, or anywhere you want! It is not uncommon at all that an experienced beatboxer will take any opportunity available to practice – in the shower, driving to work, walking up the stairs, literally doing anything. Yes, my roommates are thoroughly annoyed with me at this point. But for what it’s worth, the journey has been extremely rewarding.

A Brief History of Beatboxing

Now that you know a few of the fundamentals, it’s important that we take a closer look at where beatboxing comes from.

The consensus is that the artist who originated modern beatboxing is Douglas E. Davis, known as Doug E. Fresh (“Beatboxing: An Oral History”). Beatboxing was further developed in New York City in the 1980s with hip hop artists like Buffy, Biz Markie, and later Rahzel and Kenny Muhammed. They would make drum noises and jam out in the streets, freestyle over their sick beats, and incorporate them into their records and albums. This tradition has since stuck around the hip hop narrative, and even artists like Lauryn Hill have incorporated beatboxing into their music.

Beatboxing made its way beyond New York City, first notably to the Bay Area and Los Angeles (“Beatboxing: An Oral History”). Eventually, the art form traveled to Europe and Asia, where there are now flourishing beatboxing communities in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria, South Korea, and even Japan. The different music and cultural backgrounds have allowed for different styles and variations of beatboxing to emerge, creating a diverse global beatboxing tradition.

Like rap battles, beatbox battles have always been a form of competition for the art form. In 2005, the first Beatbox Battle World Championship was held in Germany, and has occurred every three years since. In 2009, the first annual Grand Beatbox Battle was held, widely known as the biggest beatbox competition of each year, which is now the gold standard for determining the best beatboxer of any particular year. Year after year, the best beatboxers in the world innovate and push the boundaries of the human voice for the chance to prove themselves and win it all in one of these competitions.

Beyond beatboxing in its purest form, the tradition has also found itself in the sphere of popular music, directly and indirectly. For example, Pentatonix, a 5-voice a cappella group most well-known for their yearly Christmas albums, use beatboxing as the only form of percussion in their musical arrangements. Popular artists and producers use beatboxing to supplement their music as well, like Justin Timberlake, who uses beatbox vocal samples in his music, or Charlie Puth, who uses beatboxing as a tool to aid in the creation of new music.

Despite its relatively short history in the global musical narrative, beatboxing has achieved an astounding level of popularity and utility in the landscape of popular music.

The Future of Beatboxing

Thus far, beatboxing has been purely an art form for people to enjoy, but there is plenty in store for the future of beatboxing. Given that beatboxing is an exciting crossroads between speech, language, and music, many uses for the art form have been found in medicine, technology, and research.

One relevant use for beatboxing is in speech therapy (Icht). A 2021 study on the matter found that Beatalk, a method utilizing beatboxing catered for improvement of speech, significantly improved pronunciation of the plosive [p], plosive [t], plosive [k], and affricative [ts] sounds for patients undergoing speech therapy. Patients who had trouble pronouncing these sounds before the treatment were able to make these sounds while beatboxing in ways that they were not able to achieve during regular speech. By then transitioning their beatboxing practice into their everyday speech, they were able to gain a firmer grasp on the aforementioned sounds associated with beatboxing.

In other cases, beatboxing has been used as a tool for research. For example, it’s been used to demonstrate the capacities of AI when a professional beatboxer teamed up with a research team to teach an AI how to beatbox (Verma). Another study performed in 2018 found that beatboxers and guitarists listen to music in a fundamentally different way, engaging a different part of their brain while listening to the instruments they play (Krishnan).

These studies have all been fairly recent, and it’s clear that beatboxing has yet to come into its own in the narrative of music. And still, its warm reception across the globe and its utility in science and medicine have demonstrated the worth and value of the art form.

The influence of beatboxing will continue to grow, but until then, hopefully you give those boots n’ cats a try!

Works Cited

“Beatboxing: An Oral History.” The Mercury News, 14 Aug. 2016, https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/10/beatboxing-an-oral-history/. 

Icht. (2021). Improving speech characteristics of young adults with congenital dysarthria: An exploratory study comparing articulation training and the Beatalk method. Journal of Communication Disorders, 93, 106147–106147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcomdis.2021.106147

Krishnan, Saloni, et al. “Beatboxers and Guitarists Engage Sensorimotor Regions Selectively When Listening to the Instruments They Can Play.” Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y. 1991), vol. 28, no. 11, Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 4063–79, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhy208.

Verma, Yugesh, et al. “This Is How a Human Taught an AI to Beatbox like a Pro.” Analytics India Magazine, 13 Jan. 2020, https://analyticsindiamag.com/this-is-how-a-human-taught-an-ai-to-beatbox-like-a-pro/.