I love beatboxing. I’m not too good at it myself, but I dabbled in linguistics as an undergrad, and I like programming languages (as well as using them). Somewhere, along with these concepts, beatboxing seems to fit in. Mostly, my enjoyment of beatboxing involves the ability of people (who fundamentally have the same mouths and muscles) to find new ways to make their “hardware” sound like something new.

Programming is a lot like beatboxing, insofar as we’re all using fairly standard hardware, but you know it when new software transforms the impossible into the possible, like with Google Maps. Yes, I am going to relate this back to beatboxing, because Google Maps was the first major demonstration of the power of the XMLHttpRequest object, which is the mechanism AJAX is built upon. That object had shipped with Internet Explorer and Firefox for years, but it wasn’t until Google Maps that people realized how immensely powerful it was.

This also happened to the PC demo scene during the 1990s, when Future Crew released Second Reality, which pretty much established the model for all demos thereafter.

This happened when id Software released DOOM, but this has been happening for decades, like when Ritchie released C, as a new way of programming computers, or when Turing … invented the paradigm of modern computation.

Beatboxing seems oddly reminiscent of the spirit of computer hacking, and I like having my mind blown when beatboxers show me something new that I could do too. Check out this completely sick example. Jean jean uses a jaw harp to beatbox some insane techno.

RTFA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GQ_jOPfhzE&feature…

AMAZING freestyle of jean jean ! French beatboxer